Robust object tracking with online multi-lifespan dictionary learning

Abstract

Recently, sparse representation has been introduced for robust object tracking. By representing the object sparsely, i.e., using only a few templates via L1-norm minimization, these so-called L1-trackers exhibit promising tracking results. In this work, we address the object template building and updating problem in these L1-tracking approaches, which has not been fully studied. We propose to perform template updating, in a new perspective, as an online incremental dictionary learning problem, which is efficiently solved through an online optimization procedure. To guarantee the robustness and adaptability of the tracking algorithm, we also propose to build a multi-lifespan dictionary model. By building target dictionaries of different life spans, effective object observations can be obtained to deal with the well-known drifting problem in tracking and thus improve the tracking accuracy. We derive effective observation models both generatively and discriminatively based on the online multi-lifespan dictionary learning model and deploy them to the Bayesian sequential estimation framework to perform tracking. The proposed approach has been extensively evaluated on ten challenging video sequences. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the online learned templates, as well as the state-of-the-art tracking performance of the proposed approach. © 2013 IEEE.