Dim moving target tracking algorithm based on particle discriminative sparse representation

•The motion state of dim target is uncertain within a short period.•The discriminative sparse representation enlarges the weight difference between target particle and background particle.•The consistency between the posteriori probability distribution and the moving target state is enhanced.

The small dim moving target usually submerged in strong noise, and its motion observability is debased by numerous false alarms for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A target tracking algorithm based on particle filter and discriminative sparse representation is proposed in this paper to cope with the uncertainty of dim moving target tracking. The weight of every particle is the crucial factor to ensuring the accuracy of dim target tracking for particle filter (PF) that can achieve excellent performance even under the situation of non-linear and non-Gaussian motion. In discriminative over-complete dictionary constructed according to image sequence, the target dictionary describes target signal and the background dictionary embeds background clutter. The difference between target particle and background particle is enhanced to a great extent, and the weight of every particle is then measured by means of the residual after reconstruction using the prescribed number of target atoms and their corresponding coefficients. The movement state of dim moving target is then estimated and finally tracked by these weighted particles. Meanwhile, the subspace of over-complete dictionary is updated online by the stochastic estimation algorithm. Some experiments are induced and the experimental results show the proposed algorithm could improve the performance of moving target tracking by enhancing the consistency between the posteriori probability distribution and the moving target state.