Texture-Independent Long-Term Tracking Using Virtual Corners

—Long term tracking of an object, given only a single instance in an initial frame, remains an open problem. We propose a visual tracking algorithm, robust to many of the difficulties which often occur in real-world scenes. Correspondences of edge-based features are used, to overcome the reliance on the texture of the tracked object and improve invariance to lighting. Furthermore we address long-term stability, enabling the tracker to recover from drift and to provide redetection following object disappearance or occlusion. The two-module principle is similar to the successful state-of-the-art long-term TLD tracker, however our approach offers better performance in benchmarks and extends to cases of low-textured objects. This becomes obvious in cases of plain objects with no texture at all, where the edge-based approach proves the most beneficial. We perform several different experiments to validate the proposed method. Firstly, results on short-term sequences show the performance ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TIP
• Authors: Karel Lebeda, Simon Hadfield, Jiri Matas, Richard Bowden
• Keywords: Education, TIP 2016