Learning a Robust Society of Tracking Parts

Object tracking is an essential task in computer vision that has been studied since the early days of the field. Being able to follow objects that undergo different transformations in the video sequence, including changes in scale, illumination, shape and occlusions, makes the problem extremely difficult. One of the real challenges is to keep track of the changes in objects appearance and not drift towards the background clutter. Different from previous approaches, we obtain robustness against background with a tracker model that is composed of many different parts. They are classifiers that respond at different scales and locations. The tracker system functions as a society of parts, each having its own role and level of credibility. Reliable classifiers decide the tracker's next move, while newcomers are first monitored before gaining the necessary level of reliability to participate in the decision process. Some parts that loose their consistency are rejected, while others that show consistency for a sufficiently long time are promoted to permanent roles. The tracker system, as a whole, could also go through different phases, from the usual, normal functioning to states of weak agreement and even crisis. The tracker system has different governing rules in each state. What truly distinguishes our work from others is not necessarily the strength of individual tracking parts, but the way in which they work together and build a strong and robust organization. We also propose an efficient way to learn simultaneously many tracking parts, with a single closed-form formulation. We obtain a fast and robust tracker with state of the art performance on the challenging OTB50 dataset.