A color-based particle filter for joint detection and tracking of multiple objects

Recent works have shown that the particle filter using color as observation feature is a powerful technique for tracking deformable objects in image sequences with complex backgrounds. This paper presents a hybrid valued sequential state estimation algorithm, and its particle filter-based solution, that extends the standard color particle filter in two ways. Firstly, track initialization is embedded in the particle filter without relying on an external target detection algorithm. Secondly, the algorithm is able to track multiple objects sharing the same color description. We evaluate the performance of the proposed filter on various real-world video sequences with appearing and disappearing targets.