Robust object tracking combining color and scale invariant features

Object tracking plays a very important role in many computer vision applications. However its performance will significantly deteriorate due to some challenges in complex scene, such as pose and illumination changes, clustering background and so on. In this paper, we propose a robust object tracking algorithm which exploits both global color and local scale invariant (SIFT) features in a particle filter framework. Due to the expensive computation cost of SIFT features, the proposed tracker adopts a speed-up variation of SIFT, SURF, to extract local features. Specially, the proposed method first finds matching points between the target model and target candidate, than the weight of the corresponding particle based on scale invariant features is computed as the the proportion of matching points of that particle to matching points of all particles, finally the weight of the particle is obtained by combining weights of color and SURF features with a probabilistic way. The experimental results on a variety of challenging videos verify that the proposed method is robust to pose and illumination changes and is significantly superior to the standard particle filter tracker and the mean shift tracker.