Intelligent video target tracking using an evolutionary particle filter based upon improved cuckoo search

•A novel method of object representation for object tracking.•Proposed ICS-PF for overcoming sample impoverishment of PF.•Better qualitative and quantitative performance over PSO-PF and PF.•Real time application due to less computational requirement.

The aim of this paper is to propose an evolutionary particle filter based upon improved cuckoo search algorithm which will overcome the sample impoverishment problem of generic particle filter. In our proposed method, improved cuckoo search (ICS) algorithm is embedded into particle filter (PF) framework. Improved cuckoo search algorithm uses levy flight for generating new particles in the solution and introduced randomness in samples by abandoning a fraction of these particles. The second important contribution in this article is introduction of new way for tackling scaling and rotational error in object tracking. Performance of proposed improved cuckoo particle filter is investigated and evaluated on synthetic and standard video sequences and compared with the generic particle filter and particle swarm optimization based particle filter. We show that object tracking using improved cuckoo particle filter provides more reliable and efficient tracking results than generic particle filter and PSO-particle filter. The proposed technique works for real time video objects tracking.