A Versatile Learning-Based 3D Temporal Tracker: Scalable, Robust, Online

David Joseph Tan, Federico Tombari, Slobodan Ilic, Nassir Navab; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 693-701

This paper proposes a temporal tracking algorithm based on Random Forest that uses depth images to estimate and track the 3D pose of a rigid object in real-time. Compared to the state of the art aimed at the same goal, our algorithm holds important attributes such as high robustness against holes and occlusion, low computational cost of both learning and tracking stages, and low memory consumption. These are obtained (a) by a novel formulation of the learning strategy, based on a dense sampling of the camera viewpoints and learning independent trees from a single image for each camera view; as well as, (b) by an insightful occlusion handling strategy that enforces the forest to recognize the object's local and global structures. Due to these attributes, we report state-of-the-art tracking accuracy on benchmark datasets, and accomplish remarkable scalability with the number of targets, being able to simultaneously track the pose of over a hundred objects at 30 fps with an off-the-shelf CPU. In addition, the fast learning time enables us to extend our algorithm as a robust online tracker for model-free 3D objects under different viewpoints and appearance changes as demonstrated by the experiments.