Robust 3D tracking of unknown objects

Visual tracking of unknown objects is an essential task in robotic perception, of importance to a wide range of applications. In the general scenario, the robot has no full 3D model of the object beforehand, just the partial view of the object visible in the first video frame. A tracker with this information only will inevitably lose track of the object after occlusions or large out-of-plane rotations. The way to overcome this is to incrementally learn the appearances of new views of the object. However, this bootstrapping approach is sensitive to drifting due to occasional inclusion of the background into the model.