Robust object tracking with occlusion handle

Abstract

Occlusion is a major problem for object tracking algorithms, especially for subspace-based learning algorithms like PCA. In this paper, we introduce a novel incremental subspace (robust PCA)-based object tracking algorithm to deal with the occlusion problem. The three major contributions of our works are the introduction of robust PCA to object tracking literature, a robust PCA-based occlusion handling scheme and the revised incremental PCA algorithm. In order to handle the occlusion problem in the subspace learning algorithm framework, robust PCA algorithm is employed to select part of image pixels to compute coefficients rather than the whole image pixels as in traditional PCA algorithm, which can successfully avoid the occluded pixels and therefore obtain accurate tracking results. The occlusion handling scheme fully makes use of the merits of robust PCA and can avoid false updates in occlusion, clutter, noisy and other complex situations. Besides, the introduction of incremental PCA facilitates the subspace updating process and possesses several benefits compared with traditional R-SVD-based updating methods. The experiments show that our proposed algorithm is efficient and effective to cope with common object tracking tasks, especially with strong robustness due to the introduction of robust PCA.