Reliable and fast human body tracking under information deficiency

Abstract

Human body tracking is useful in applications like medical diagnostic, human computer interface, visual surveillance etc. In most cases, only rough position of the target is needed, and blob tracking can be used. The blob region is located within a searching window, which is shifted and resized in each frame based on previous observations. The observations are the locations of the blob in the frames, and are fed into an estimator for predicting the position and the size of the searching window. However, a blob region is regarded as a noisy observation, and the information provided by the blob observation is deficient for most estimators to work well. In this paper, a reliable and efficient estimation algorithm using wavelet is proposed to track human body under information deficiency. The human body is located roughly within a small searching window using color and motion as heuristics. The location and the size of the searching window are estimated using the proposed wavelet estimation scheme. Experimental results show that human body can be tracked accurately and efficiently using the proposed method. The tracker works well in various conditions like clutter background, and background with distractors.