Adaptive pyramid mean shift for global real-time visual tracking

Tracking objects in videos using the mean shift technique has attracted considerable attention. In this work, a novel approach for global target tracking based on mean shift technique is proposed. The proposed method represents the model and the candidate in terms of background weighted histogram and color weighted histogram, respectively, which can obtain precise object size adaptively with low computational complexity. To track targets whose displacements between two successive frames are relatively large, we implement the mean shift procedure via a coarse-to-fine way for global maximum seeking. This procedure is termed as adaptive pyramid mean shift, because it uses the pyramid analysis technique and can determine the pyramid level adaptively to decrease the number of iterations required to achieve convergence. Experimental results on various tracking videos and its application to a tracking and pointing subsystem show that the proposed method can successfully cope with different situations such as camera motion, camera vibration, camera zoom and focus, high-speed moving object tracking, partial occlusions, target scale variations, etc. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.