A novel fast object tracking method based on hierarchical block matching

Research on object tracking has been an active field because of its fundamental roles in surveillance and monitoring. In this paper, a new adaptive algorithm for fast target tracking based on hierarchical block matching is proposed. The improvement of the algorithm lies in three aspects. First, the hierarchical pyramid method is applied to enhance the search efficiency of the local features. In addition, at different pyramid level, an adaptive searching strategy is adopted according to the number of candidate features. Second, since image blocks make full use of local characters of features, the structure similarity method, associated with the relation coefficient in statistics, can be exploited to design a new matching criteria, which provides more precise matching results, especially in the complex scenes such as the change of illumination and partial occlusion. Lastly, traditional algorithms often track the object through adjacent frames, whereas our algorithm will search two frames with a variable interval on the basis of matching results. The intervals are obtained by using the bisection method and thus the searching time can be greatly saved. Simulation results show that the proposed block matching method has better performances in the searching time and accuracy in contrast to the classic Mean-Shift target tracking algorithm and Particle Filter target tracking algorithm under the complex circumstances such as illumination variation and partial occlusion.