Online learning of multi-feature weights for robust object tracking

Sparse Representation based Classification (SRC) and its potential in object tracking have been explored in recent years. However, the trade-off between the discriminative ability of the overly emphasized sparse representation and the lack of insight on correlation of visual information has raised questions over the general applicability of such methods in object tracking. In addition, the need for the optimization of a series of l₁-regularized least square norm, increases the computational complexity thereby limiting their usage in real-time applications. In this paper, a novel approach to robust object tracking is proposed. First, the variations in the appearance of the tracked target is modelled using PCA basis vectors, and further, a l₂-regularized least square method is used to solve the proposed representation model. In order to improve the robustness of feature representation in object tracking applications, weights are associated with multiple trackers; each formulated using a different feature, and adapted via an online learning scheme. Finally, a decision fusion criterion is imposed to generate an optimized output through the weighted combination of different tracking results. Experiments on challenging video sequences have demonstrated the superior accuracy and robustness of the proposed method in comparison to thirteen other state-of-the-art baselines.