Robust object tracking with a hierarchical ensemble framework

Autonomous robots enjoy a wide popularity nowadays and have been applied in many applications, such as home security, entertainment, delivery, navigation and guidance. It is vital for robots to track objects accurately in real time in these applications, so it is necessary to focus on tracking algorithms to improve the robustness, speed and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a real-time robust object tracking algorithm based on a hierarchical ensemble framework which incorporates information including individual pixel features, local patches and holistic target models. The framework combines multiple ensemble models simultaneously instead of using a single ensemble model individually. A discriminative model which accounts for the matching degree of local patches is adopted via a bottom ensemble layer, and a generative model which exploits holistic templates is used to search for the object based on the middle ensemble layer as well as an adaptive Kalman filter. We test the proposed tracker on challenging benchmark image sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs superiorly against several state-of-the-art algorithms, especially when the appearance changes dramatically and the occlusions occur.