Multiple video object tracking in complex scenes

ABSTRACT

We present an automatic video object tracking algorithm capable of dealing with multiple simultaneous objects. The tracking is based on interactions between high-level and low-level image analysis results. The high-level result is a partition defining video objects, and the low-level result is a partition formed by homogeneous regions. For each region, a set of characteristic descriptors is produced. These region descriptors, and not regions themselves, are used to track the regions (and thus the objects) along time. Track management issues such as appearance and disappearance of objects, splitting and partial occlusions are resolved through interactions between regions and objects. Defining the tracking based on the parts of objects, identified by region segmentation, has led to a flexible technique that exploits the nature of the video object tracking problem. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to track multiple rigid and deformable objects in indoor and outdoor scenes.

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