Signature-aided air-to-ground video tracking

Tracking ground moving objects using aerial video sensors is very challenging when the objects go through periods of occlusion caused by trees or buildings. If the occlusion interval is relatively large, there are confusing objects in the vicinity, or the object performs abrupt maneuvers while occluded, maintaining continuous tracks after the occlusion requires advanced exploitation of the imagery. This paper presents a signature-aided multiple hypothesis tracking system where signatures are extracted during periods of certainty and used after the occlusion to resolve association ambiguity. The discussion focuses on the interaction between the tracker and the signature extraction/exploitation module, as well as other tracking aspects within the signature-aided tracking paradigm.