Weighted Mean Shift Object Tracking Implemented on GPU for Embedded Sustems

Real time and accrual object tracking is ultimate aim of a visual tracker. Recently mean shift object tracking algorithm is studied in an all-round way and utilized to visual tracking in both civil and military fields. Compared to the traditional mean shift algorithm and its other versions distance weight mean shift algorithm can effectively improve the precision and robustness. It analyzes the dissimilarity of target feature color histogram with distance weight and candidate area feature color histogram with distance weight to calculate mean shift vector, and searches for target area via each iteration in candidate area. Though improved on basis of traditional mean shift algorithm, there are a large amount of calculations and the processing speed has already been a bottleneck in real time object tracking. Graphics processor unit (GPU) has special hardware parallel computing resources and has been already employed in various embedded systems. It provides us with an alternative implementation on GPU which can solve such bottleneck problem. The paper proposes a way of implementation of distance weight mean shift algorithm on GPU. The experiment results show that the execution performance of the implementation on GPU is over 56 times speedup of that completely on CPU at most, and can meet the requirement of real time and accuracy.