Minimum Uncertainty Gap for Robust Visual Tracking

Junseok Kwon, Kyoung Mu Lee; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 2355-2362

We propose a novel tracking algorithm that robustly tracks the target by finding the state which minimizes uncertainty of the likelihood at current state. The uncertainty of the likelihood is estimated by obtaining the gap between the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood. By minimizing the gap between the two bounds, our method finds the confident and reliable state of the target. In the paper, the state that gives the Minimum Uncertainty Gap (MUG) between likelihood bounds is shown to be more reliable than the state which gives the maximum likelihood only, especially when there are severe illumination changes, occlusions, and pose variations. A rigorous derivation of the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood for the visual tracking problem is provided to address this issue. Additionally, an efficient inference algorithm using Interacting Markov Chain Monte Carlo is presented to find the best state that maximizes the average of the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood and minimizes the gap between two bounds simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully tracks the target in realistic videos and outperforms conventional tracking methods.