Robust Visual Tracking With Multitask Joint Dictionary Learning

Dictionary learning for sparse representation has been increasingly applied to object tracking, however, the existing methods only utilize one modality of the object to learn a single dictionary. In this paper, we propose a robust tracking method based on multitask joint dictionary learning. Through extracting different features of the target, multiple linear sparse representations are obtained. Each sparse representation can be learned by a corresponding dictionary. Instead of separately learning the multiple dictionaries, we adopt a multitask learning approach to learn the multiple linear sparse representations, which provide additional useful information to the classification problem. Because different tasks may favor different sparse representation coefficients, yet the joint sparsity may enforce the robustness in coefficient estimation. During tracking, a classifier is constructed based on a joint linear representation, and the candidate with the smallest joint decision error is selected to be the tracked object. In addition, reliable tracking results and augmented training samples are accumulated into two sets to update the dictionaries for classification, which helps our tracker adapt to the fast time-varying object appearance. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on CVPR2013 visual tracking benchmark demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers.