Trackability

Trackability is defined here as a numerical measure associated with a video for a given target that increases with decreasing difficulty of tracking the target. The method applied to quantify trackability is grounded in information theory. First, a measure of similarity between the target signal and the template is established by way of mutual information. This mutual information becomes a three-variable analysis as the influence of clutter is considered. The effects of video quality are included in a traditional Shannon-Hartley computation and the motion of the target and registration of the video are used to modify this quality-motion term. The sum of both terms, computed in bits per second, yields trackability. Fifteen tracking experiments show a promising Spearman rank correlation between the trackability and the actual tracking performance.