Niloufar Salehi Dastjerdi and M. Omair Ahmad, Concordia University, Canada

Object tracking, in general, is a promising technology that can be utilized in a wide variety of applications. It is a challenging problem and its difficulties in tracking objects may fail when confronted with challenging scenarios such as similar background color, occlusion, illumination variation, or background clutter. A number of ongoing challenges still remain and an improvement on accuracy can be obtained with additional processing of information. Hence, utilizing depth information can potentially be exploited to boost the performance of traditional object tracking algorithms. Therefore, a large trend in this paper is to integrate depth data with other features in tracking to improve the performance of tracking algorithm and disambiguate occlusions and overcome other challenges such as illumination artifacts. For this, we use the basic idea of many trackers which consists of three main components of the reference model, i.e., object modeling, object detection and localization, and model updating. However, there are major improvements in our system. Our forth component, occlusion handling, utilizes the depth spatiogram of target and occluder to localize the target and occluder. The proposed research develops an efficient and robust way to keep tracking the object throughout video sequences in the presence of significant appearance variations and severe occlusions. The proposed method is evaluated on the Princeton RGBD tracking dataset and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Visual Tracking, Depth Spatiogram, Multi-feature Data, Occlusion Handling