Mean-Shift Blob Tracking with Adaptive Feature Selection and Scale Adaptation

When the appearances of the tracked object and surrounding background change during tracking, fixed feature space tends to cause tracking failure. To address this problem, we propose a method to embed adaptive feature selection into mean shift tracking framework. From a feature set, the most discriminative features are selected after ranking these features based on their Bayes error rates, which are estimated from object and background samples. For the selected features, a criterion is proposed to evaluate their stability for tracking and to guide feature reselection. The selected features are used to generate a weight image, in which mean shift is employed to locate the object. Moreover, a simple yet effective scale adaptation method is proposed to deal with object changing in size. Experiments on several video sequences show the effectiveness of the proposed method.