Gang Yao

Gang Yao, Ashwin Dani

In this paper, a novel image moments based model for shape estimation and tracking of an object moving with a complex trajectory is presented. The camera is assumed to be stationary looking at a moving object. Point features inside the object are sampled as measurements. An ellipsoidal approximation of the shape is assumed as a primitive shape. The shape of an ellipse is estimated using a combination of image moments. Dynamic model of image moments when the object moves under the constant velocity or coordinated turn motion model is derived as a function for the shape estimation of the object. An Unscented Kalman Filter-Interacting Multiple Model (UKF-IMM) filter algorithm is applied to estimate the shape of the object (approximated as an ellipse) and track its position and velocity. A likelihood function based on average log-likelihood is derived for the IMM filter. Simulation results of the proposed UKF-IMM algorithm with the image moments based models are presented that show the estimations of the shape of the object moving in complex trajectories. Comparison results, using intersection over union (IOU), and position and velocity root mean square errors (RMSE) as metrics, with a benchmark algorithm from literature are presented. Results on real image data captured from the quadcopter are also presented.

Gang Yao, Ashwin Dani

An efficient iterative Earth Mover's Distance (iEMD) algorithm for visual tracking is proposed in this paper. The Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) is used as the similarity measure to search for the optimal template candidates in feature-spatial space in a video sequence. The computation of the EMD is formulated as the transportation problem from linear programming. The efficiency of the EMD optimization problem limits its use for visual tracking. To alleviate this problem, a transportation-simplex method is used for EMD optimization and a monotonically convergent iterative optimization algorithm is developed. The local sparse representation is used as the appearance models for the iEMD tracker. The maximum-alignment-pooling method is used for constructing a sparse coding histogram which reduces the computational complexity of the EMD optimization. The template update algorithm based on the EMD is also presented. The iEMD tracking algorithm assumes small inter-frame movement in order to guarantee convergence. When the camera is mounted on a moving robot, e.g., a flying quadcopter, the camera could experience a sudden and rapid motion leading to large inter-frame movements. To ensure that the tracking algorithm converges, a gyro-aided extension of the iEMD tracker is presented, where synchronized gyroscope information is utilized to compensate for the rotation of the camera. The iEMD algorithm's performance is evaluated using eight publicly available datasets. The performance of the iEMD algorithm is compared with seven state-of-the-art tracking algorithms based on relative percentage overlap. The robustness of this algorithm for large inter-frame displacements is also illustrated.