Spatio-Temporal Context for Robust Multitarget Tracking

  • Authors:
  • Hieu T. Nguyen;Qiang Ji;Arnold W. M. Smeulders

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY and IEEE;Dept. of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Trpy, NY and IEEE;Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and IEEE

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In multitarget tracking, the main challenge is to maintain the correct identity of targets even under occlusions or when differences between the targets are small. The paper proposes a new approach to this problem by incorporating the context information. The context of a target in an image sequence has two components: the spatial context including the local background and nearby targets and the temporal context including all appearances of the targets that have been seen previously. The paper considers both aspects. We propose a new model for multitarget tracking based on the classification of each target against its spatial context. The tracker searches a region similar to the target while avoiding nearby targets. The temporal context is included by integrating the entire history of target appearance based on probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA). We have developed a newincremental scheme that can learn the full set of PPCA parameters accurately online. The experiments show robust tracking performance under the condition of severe clutter, occlusions, and pose changes.