IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 2008 E91-D(1):86-95; doi:10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.1.86

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Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Regular Section -- Papers -- Image Recognition, Computer Vision

Visual Tracking in Occlusion Environments by Autonomous Switching of Targets

Jun-ichi IMAI¹ and Masahide KANEKO¹

¹ The authors are with Graduate School of Electro-Communications, the University of Electro-Communications, Chofu-shi, 182–8585 Japan.

Visual tracking is required by many vision applications such as human-computer interfaces and human-robot interactions. However, in daily living spaces where such applications are assumed to be used, stable tracking is often difficult because there are many objects which can cause the visual occlusion. While conventional tracking techniques can handle, to some extent, partial and short-term occlusion, they fail when presented with complete occlusion over long periods. They also cannot handle the case that an occluder such as a box and a bag contains and carries the tracking target inside itself, that is, the case that the target invisibly moves while being contained by the occluder. In this paper, to handle this occlusion problem, we propose a method for visual tracking by a particle filter, which switches tracking targets autonomously. In our method, if occlusion occurs during tracking, a model of the occluder is dynamically created and the tracking target is switched to this model. Thus, our method enables the tracker to indirectly track the "invisible target" by switching its target to the occluder effectively. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Key Words: visual tracking, occlusion, autonomous switching of targets, particle filter

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Manuscript received November 17, 2006. Manuscript revised July 23, 2007.

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This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My Personal Archive Download to citation manager Request Permissions Google Scholar Articles by IMAI, J.-i. Articles by KANEKO, M. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking          What's this?