Visual tracking of non-rigid objects with partial occlusion through elastic structure of local patches and hierarchical diffusion

• We propose a tracking method to solve both the problem of partial occlusions and non-rigid deformations in real-time.
• The target object is modeled through an elastic structure of local patches for robust performance.
• Hierarchical diffusion method is proposed to obtain an acceptable solution in real time.
• Extensive evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art.

In this paper, a tracking method based on sequential Bayesian inference is proposed. The proposed method focuses on solving both the problem of tracking under partial occlusions and the problem of non-rigid object tracking in real-time on a desktop personal computer (PC). The proposed method is mainly composed of two parts: (1) modeling the target object using elastic structure of local patches for robust performance; and (2) efficient hierarchical diffusion method to perform the tracking procedure in real-time. The elastic structure of local patches allows the proposed method to handle partial occlusions and non-rigid deformations through the relationship among neighboring patches. The proposed hierarchical diffusion method generates samples from the region where the posterior is concentrated to reduce computation time. The method is extensively tested on a number of challenging image sequences with occlusion and non-rigid deformation. The experimental results show the real-time capability and the robustness of the proposed method under various situations.

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