Robust Visual Tracking via Patch Descriptor and Structural Local Sparse Representation

Appearance models play an important role in visual tracking. Effective modeling of the appearance of tracked objects is still a challenging problem because of object appearance changes caused by factors, such as partial occlusion, illumination variation and deformation, etc. In this paper, we propose a tracking method based on the patch descriptor and the structural local sparse representation. In our method, the object is firstly divided into multiple non-overlapped patches, and the patch sparse coefficients are obtained by structural local sparse representation. Secondly, each patch is further decomposed into several sub-patches. The patch descriptors are defined as the proportion of sub-patches, of which the reconstruction error is less than the given threshold. Finally, the appearance of an object is modeled by the patch descriptors and the patch sparse coefficients. Furthermore, in order to adapt to appearance changes of an object and alleviate the model drift, an outlier-aware template update scheme is introduced. Experimental results on a large benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.