Correlation-based incremental visual tracking

Generative subspace models like probabilistic principal component analysis (PCA) have been shown to be quite effective for visual tracking problems due to their representational power that can capture the generation process for high-dimensional image data. The recent advance of incremental learning has further enabled them to be practical for real-time scenarios. Despite these benefits, the PCA-based approaches in visual tracking can be potentially susceptible to noise such as partial occlusion due to their compatibility judgement based on the goodness of fitting for the entire image patch. In this paper we introduce a novel appearance model that measures the goodness of target matching as the correlation score between partial sub-patches within a target. We incorporate the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) into the probabilistic filtering framework in a principled manner, and derive how the correlation score can be evaluated efficiently in the proposed model. We then provide an efficient incremental learning algorithm that updates the CCA subspaces to adapt to new data available from the previous tracking results. We demonstrate the significant improvement in tracking accuracy achieved by the proposed approach on extensive datasets including the large-scale real-world YouTube celebrity video database as well as the novel video lecture dataset acquired from British Machine Vision Conference held in 2009, where both datasets are challenging due to the abrupt changes in pose, size, and illumination conditions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.