Motion-Aware Correlation Filters for Online Visual Tracking

The discriminative correlation filters-based methods struggle deal with the problem of fast motion and heavy occlusion, the problem can severely degrade the performance of trackers, ultimately leading to tracking failures. In this paper, a novel Motion-Aware Correlation Filters (MACF) framework is proposed for online visual object tracking, where a motion-aware strategy based on joint instantaneous motion estimation Kalman filters is integrated into the Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCFs). The proposed motion-aware strategy is used to predict the possible region and scale of the target in the current frame by utilizing the previous estimated 3D motion information. Obviously, this strategy can prevent model drift caused by fast motion. On the base of the predicted region and scale, the MACF detects the position and scale of the target by using the DCFs-based method in the current frame. Furthermore, an adaptive model updating strategy is proposed to address the problem of corrupted models caused by occlusions, where the learning rate is determined by the confidence of the response map. The extensive experiments on popular Object Tracking Benchmark OTB-100, OTB-50 and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) video have demonstrated that the proposed MACF tracker performs better than most of the state-of-the-art trackers and achieves a high real-time performance. In addition, the proposed approach can be integrated easily and flexibly into other visual tracking algorithms.

Target Tracking for Visual Servoing Systems Based on an Adaptive Kalman Filter

Visual servoing has been around for decades, but time delay is still one of the most troublesome problems to achieve target tracking. To circumvent the problem, in this paper, the Kalman filter is employed to estimate the future position of the object. In order to introduce the Kalman filter, accurate time delays, which include the processing lag and the motion lag, need to be obtained. Thus, the delays of the visual control servoing systems are discussed and a generic timing model for the system is provided. Then, we present a current statistical model for a moving target. A fuzzy adaptive Kalman filter, which is evolved from the Kalman filter, is introduced based on the current statistical model. Finally, a two DOF visual controller based variable structure control law for micro-manipulation is presented. The results show that the proposed adaptive Kalman filter can improve the ability to track moving targets.

Optimal local searching for fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking in highly cluttered backgrounds

Edge-based tracking is a fast and plausible approach for textureless 3D object tracking, but its robustness is still very challenging in highly cluttered backgrounds due to numerous local minima. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method for fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking in highly cluttered backgrounds. The proposed method is based on optimal local searching of 3D-2D correspondences between a known 3D object model and 2D scene edges in an image with heavy background clutter. In our searching scheme, searching regions are partitioned into three levels (interior, contour, and exterior) with respect to the previous object region, and confident searching directions are determined by evaluating candidates of correspondences on their region levels; thus, the correspondences are searched among likely candidates in only the confident directions instead of searching through all candidates. To ensure the confident searching direction, we also adopt the region appearance, which is efficiently modeled on a newly defined local space (called a searching bundle). Experimental results and performance evaluations demonstrate that our method fully supports fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking even in highly cluttered backgrounds.

A SINGLE-OBJECT TRACKING METHOD FOR ROBOTS USING OBJECT-BASED VISUAL ATTENTION

It is a quite challenging problem for robots to track the target in complex environment due to appearance changes of the target and background, large variation of motion, partial and full occlusion, motion of the camera and so on. However, humans are capable to cope with these difficulties by using their cognitive capability, mainly including the visual attention and learning mechanisms. This paper therefore presents a single-object tracking method for robots based on the object-based attention mechanism. This tracking method consists of four modules: pre-attentive segmentation, top-down attentional selection, post-attentive processing and online learning of the target model. The pre-attentive segmentation module first divides the scene into uniform proto-objects. Then the top-down attention module selects one proto-object over the predicted region by using a discriminative feature of the target. The post-attentive processing module then validates the attended proto-object. If it is confirmed to be the target, it is used to obtain the complete target region. Otherwise, the recovery mechanism is automatically triggered to globally search for the target. Given the complete target region, the online learning algorithm autonomously updates the target model, which consists of appearance and saliency components. The saliency component is used to automatically select a discriminative feature for top-down attention, while the appearance component is used for bias estimation in the top-down attention module and validation in the post-attentive processing module. Experiments have shown that this proposed method outperforms other algorithms without using attention for tracking a single target in cluttered and dynamically changing environment.