Robust appearance-guided particle filter for object tracking with occlusion analysis

Abstract A major challenge for most tracking algorithms is how to address the changes of object appearance during tracking, incurred by large illumination, scale, pose variations and occlusions. Without any adaptability to these variations, the tracker may fail. In contrast, if adapts too fast, the appearance model is likely to absorb some improper part of the background or occluding objects. In this paper, we explore a tracking algorithm based on the robust appearance model which can account for slow or rapid changes of object appearance. Specifically, each pixel in appearance model is represented using mixture Gaussian models whose parameters are on-line learned by sequential kernel density approximation. The appearance model is then embedded into particle filter framework. In addition, an occlusion handling scheme is invoked to explicitly indicate outlier pixels and deal with occlusion events, thus avoiding the appearance model to be contaminated by undesirable outlier ‘thing’. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our appearance-based tracking algorithm can successfully track the object in the presence of dramatic appearance changes, cluttered background and even severe occlusions.