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Robust Object Tracking via Information Theoretic Measures

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Abstract

Object tracking is a very important topic in the field of computer vision. Many sophisticated appearance models have been proposed. Among them, the trackers based on holistic appearance information provide a compact notion of the tracked object and thus are robust to appearance variations under a small amount of noise. However, in practice, the tracked objects are often corrupted by complex noises (e.g., partial occlusions, illumination variations) so that the original appearance-based trackers become less effective. This paper presents a correntropy-based robust holistic tracking algorithm to deal with various noises. Then, a half-quadratic algorithm is carefully employed to minimize the correntropy-based objective function. Based on the proposed information theoretic algorithm, we design a simple and effective template update scheme for object tracking. Experimental results on publicly available videos demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other popular tracking algorithms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61702513, 61525306, 61633021), National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFB1001000), Capital Science and Technology Leading Talent Training Project (No. Z181100006318030), CAS-AIR and Shandong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (Major Scientific and Technological Innovation Project) (No. 2019JZZY010119)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Wei-Ning Wang, Qi Li & Liang Wang

  2. School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Wei-Ning Wang, Qi Li & Liang Wang

  3. Artificial Intelligence Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, 266300, China

    Qi Li

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Correspondence to Qi Li.

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Recommended by Associate Editor Hui Yu

Wei-Ning Wang received the B.Eng. degree in automation from North China Electric Power University, China in 2015. She is currently a Ph.D. degree candidate at National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), China.

Her research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition and video analysis.

Qi Li received the B.Eng. degree in automation from the China University of Petroleum, China in 2011 and the Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and intelligent systems from CASIA, China in 2016. He is currently an associate professor with the Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.

His research interests include face recognition, computer vision, and machine learning.

Liang Wang received both the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees from Anhui University, China in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph. D. degree from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), China in 2004. From 2004 to 2010, he was a research assistant at Imperial College London, UK, and Mon-ash University, Australia, a research fellow with the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a lecturer with the University of Bath, UK, respectively. Currently, he is a full professor of the Hundred Talents Program at the National Lab of Pattern Recognition, CASIA, China. He is currently an IEEE Fellow and IAPR Fellow.

His research interests include machine learning, pattern recognition, and computer vision.

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Wang, WN., Li, Q. & Wang, L. Robust Object Tracking via Information Theoretic Measures. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 17, 652–666 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-020-1235-2

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