Robust Outdoor Vehicle Visual Tracking Based on k-Sparse Stacked Denoising Auto-Encoder

Robust visual tracking for outdoor vehicle is still a challenging problem due to large object appearance variations caused by illumination variation, occlusion, and fast motion. In this chapter, k-sparse constraint is added to the encoder part of stacked auto-encoder network to learn more invariant feature of object appearance, and a stacked k-sparse-auto-encoder–based robust outdoor vehicle tracking method under particle filter inference is further proposed to solve the problem of appearance variance during the tracking. Firstly, a stacked denoising auto-encoder is pre-trained to learn the generic feature representation. Then, a k-sparse constraint is added to the stacked denoising auto-encoder, and the encoder of k-sparse stacked denoising auto-encoder is connected with a classification layer to construct a classification neural network. Finally, confidence of each particle is computed by the classification neural network and is used for online tracking under particle filter framework. Comprehensive tracking experiments are conducted on a challenging single-object tracking benchmark. Experimental results show that our tracker outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers

Robust online visual tracking

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Visual tracking plays a key role in many computer vision systems. In this thesis, we study online visual object tracking and try to tackle challenges that present in practical tracking scenarios. Motivated by different challenges, several robust online visual trackers have been developed by taking advantage of advanced techniques from machine learning and computer vision. In particular, we propose a robust distracter-resistant tracking approach by learning a discriminative metric to handle distracter problem. The proposed metric is elaborately designed for the tracking problem by forming a margin objective function which systematically includes distance margin maximization, reconstruction error constraint, and similarity propagation techniques. The distance metric obtained helps to preserve the most discriminative information to separate the target from distracters while ensuring the stability of the optimal metric. To handle background clutter problem and achieve better tracking performance, we develop a tracker using an approximate Least Absolute Deviation (LAD)-based multi-task multi-view sparse learning method to enjoy robustness of LAD and take advantage of multiple types of visual features. The proposed method is integrated in a particle filter framework where learning the sparse representation for each view of a single particle is regarded as an individual task. The underlying relationship between tasks across different views and different particles is jointly exploited in a unified robust multi-task formulation based on LAD. In addition, to capture the frequently emerging outlier tasks, we decompose the representation matrix to two collaborative components which enable a more robust and accurate approximation. In addition, a hierarchical appearance representation model is proposed for non-rigid object tracking, based on a graphical model that exploits shared information across multiple quantization levels. The tracker aims to find the most possible position of the target by jointly classifying the pixels and superpixels and obtaining the best configuration across all levels. The motion of the bounding box is taken into consideration, while Online Random Forests are used to provide pixel- and superpixel-level quantizations and progressively updated on-the-fly. Finally, inspired by the well-known Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model, we propose MUlti-Store Tracker, a dual-component approach consisting of short- and long-term memory stores to process target appearance memories. A powerful and efficient Integrated Correlation Filter is employed in the short-term store for short-term tracking. The integrated long-term component, which is based on keypoint matching-tracking and RANSAC estimation, can interact with the long-term memory and provide additional information for output control

Robust visual tracking via efficient manifold ranking with low-dimensional compressive features

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract In this paper, a novel and robust tracking method based on efficient manifold ranking is proposed. For tracking, tracked results are taken as labeled nodes while candidate samples are taken as unlabeled nodes. The goal of tracking is to search the unlabeled sample that is the most relevant to the existing labeled nodes. Therefore, visual tracking is regarded as a ranking problem in which the relevance between an object appearance model and candidate samples is predicted by the manifold ranking algorithm. Due to the outstanding ability of the manifold ranking algorithm in discovering the underlying geometrical structure of a given image database, our tracker is more robust to overcome tracking drift. Meanwhile, we adopt non-adaptive random projections to preserve the structure of original image space, and a very sparse measurement matrix is used to efficiently extract low-dimensional compressive features for object representation. Furthermore, spatial context is used to improve the robustness to appearance variations. Experimental results on some challenging video sequences show that the proposed algorithm outperforms seven state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness

Visual tracking via graph-based efficient manifold ranking with low-dimensional compressive features

© 2014 IEEE. In this paper, a novel and robust tracking method based on efficient manifold ranking is proposed. For tracking, tracked results are taken as labeled nodes while candidate samples are taken as unlabeled nodes, and the goal of tracking is to search the unlabeled sample that is the most relevant with existing labeled nodes by manifold ranking algorithm. Meanwhile, we adopt non-adaptive random projections to preserve the structure of original image space, and a very sparse measurement matrix is used to efficiently extract low-dimensional compres-sive features for object representation. Furthermore, spatial context is used to improve the robustness to appearance variations. Experimental results on some challenging video sequences show the proposed algorithm outperforms six state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness