Hybrid POMDP based evolutionary adaptive framework for efficient visual tracking algorithms

This paper presents an evolutionary and adaptive framework for efficient visual tracking based on a hybrid POMDP formulation. The main focus is to guarantee visual tracking performance under varying environments without strongly-controlled situations or high-cost devices. The performance optimization is formulated as a dynamic adaptation of the system control parameters, i.e., threshold and adjusting parameters in a visual tracking algorithm, based on the hybrid of offline and online POMDPs. The hybrid POMDP allows the agent to construct world-belief models under uncertain environments in offline, and focus on the optimization of the system control parameters over the current world model in real-time. Since the visual tracking should satisfy strict real-time constraints, we restrict our attention to simpler and faster approaches instead of exploring the belief space of each world model directly. The hybrid POMDP is thus solved by an evolutionary adaptive framework employing the GA (Genetic Algorithm) and real-time Q-learning approaches in the optimally reachable genotype and phenotype spaces, respectively. Experiments were carried out extensively in the area of eye tracking using videos of various structures and qualities, and yielded very encouraging results. The framework can achieve an optimal performance by balancing the tracking accuracy and real-time constraints.