A multiple template approach for robust tracking of fast motion target

Target tracking is very important in computer vision and related areas. It is usually difficult to accurately track fast motion target with appearance variations. Sometimes the tracking algorithms fail for heavy appearance variations. A multiple template method to track fast motion target with appearance changes is presented under the framework of appearance model with Kalman filter. Firstly, we construct a multiple template appearance model, which includes both the original template and templates affinely transformed from original one. Generally speaking, appearance variations of fast motion target can be covered by affine transformation. Therefore, the affine transform-enhanced templates match the target of appearance variations better than conventional models. Secondly, we present an improved Kalman filter for approximate estimating the motion trail of the target and a modified similarity evaluation function for exact matching. The estimation approach can reduce time complexity of the algorithm and keep accuracy in the meantime. Thirdly, we propose an adaptive scheme for updating template set to alleviate the drift problem. The scheme considers the following differences: the weight differences in two successive frames; different types of affine transformation applied to templates. Finally, experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust to appearance variation of fast motion target and achieves real-time performance on middle/low-range computing platform.