Visual contour tracking based on inner-contour model particle filter under complex background

In this paper, a novel particle filter–based visual contour tracking method is proposed, which uses inner-contour model to track contour object under complex background. The purpose is to achieve effectiveness and robustness against complex background. To that end, the proposed method first utilized Sobel edge detector to detect the edge information along the normal line of the contour. Then, it sampled the inner part of the normal line to get the local color information, which was then combined with the edge information to construct new normal line likelihood. After that, all the inner color information was used to construct global color likelihood. Finally, the edge information, local color information, and global color information were fused into new observation likelihood. Experimental results showed that the proposed method was robust for contours tracking under complex background, and it was also computationally efficient and can run in real-time completely.