Robust online tracking via adaptive samples selection with saliency detection

Online tracking has shown to be successful in tracking of previously unknown objects. However, there are two important factors which lead to drift problem of online tracking, the one is how to select the exact labeled samples even when the target locations are inaccurate, and the other is how to handle the confusors which have similar features with the target. In this article, we propose a robust online tracking algorithm with adaptive samples selection based on saliency detection to overcome the drift problem. To deal with the problem of degrading the classifiers using mis-aligned samples, we introduce the saliency detection method to our tracking problem. Saliency maps and the strong classifiers are combined to extract the most correct positive samples. Our approach employs a simple yet saliency detection algorithm based on image spectral residual analysis. Furthermore, instead of using the random patches as the negative samples, we propose a reasonable selection criterion, in which both the saliency confidence and similarity are considered with the benefits that confusors in the surrounding background are incorporated into the classifiers update process before the drift occurs. The tracking task is formulated as a binary classification via online boosting framework. Experiment results in several challenging video sequences demonstrate the accuracy and stability of our tracker.