Information theory-based analysis of partial and total occlusion in object tracking

Metrics based on mutual information and not resorting to ground truth data are proposed in this paper in order to measure tracking reliability under occlusion., The variations of the proposed metrics can be used as a quantitative estimate of changes in the tracking region, caused by occlusion, sudden movement or the deformation of the tracked object. The proposed metric was tested on an object tracking scheme using multiple feature point correspondences. Experimental results have shown that mutual information can effectively characterize object appearance and reappearance in many computer vision applications.