Using Discriminative Motion Context for Online Visual Object Tracking

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for online, real-time tracking of arbitrary objects in videos from unconstrained environments. The method is based on a particle filter framework using different visual features and motion prediction models. We effectively integrate a discriminative online learning classifier into the model and propose a new method to collect negative training examples for updating the classifier at each video frame. Instead of taking negative examples only from the surroundings of the object region, or from specific background regions, our algorithm samples the negatives from a contextual motion density function in order to learn to discriminate the target as early as possible from potential distracting image regions. We experimentally show that this learning scheme improves the overall performance of the tracking algorithm. Moreover, we present quantitative and qualitative results on four challenging public data sets that show the robustness of the tracking algorithm with respect to appearance and view changes, lighting variations, partial occlusions, as well as object deformations. Finally, we compare the results with more than 30 state-of-the-art methods using two public benchmarks, showing very competitive results.