Clustering Motion for Real-Time Optical Flow based Tracking

The selection of regions or sets of points to track is a key task in motion-based video analysis, which has significant performance effects in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. Computational efficiency is an unavoidable requirement in video surveillance applications. Well established methods, e. g. Good Features to Track, select points to be tracked based on appearance features such as cornerness and therefore neglecting the motion exhibited by the selected points. In this paper, we propose an interest point selection method that takes into account the motion of previously tracked points in order to constrain the number of point trajectories needed. By defining pair-wise temporal affinities between trajectories and representing them in a minimum spanning tree, we achieve a very efficient clustering. The number of trajectories assigned to each motion cluster is adapted by initializing and removing tracked points by means of feed-back. Compared to the KLT tracker, we save up to 65% of the points to track, therefore gaining in efficiency while not scarifying accuracy.