Appearance based object tracking in stereo sequences

A novel algorithm is proposed, that performs tracking of rigid objects in 3D videos, without knowledge of the camera calibration parameters, by exploiting only visual information obtained from the left and right video channels, namely luminance and disparity information. The proposed algorithm exploits noisy disparity maps that have been extracted by a real-time disparity estimation algorithm. The algorithm employs two appearance-based representation methods for describing the object texture. The first one combines luminance with disparity information and the second one employs Local Steering Kernel (LSK) descriptors.