Object tracking based on particle filter with discriminative features

This paper presents a particle filter-based visual tracking method with online feature selection mechanism. In color-based particle filter algorithm the weights of particles do not always represent the importance correctly, this may cause that the object tracking based on particle filter converge to a local region of the object. In our proposed visual tracking method, the Bhattacharyya distance and the local discrimination between the object and background are used to define the weights of the particles, which can solve the existing local convergence problem. Experiments demonstrates that the proposed method can work well not only in single object tracking processes but also in multiple similar objects tracking processes. © 2013 South China University of Technology, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.