Non-rigid object tracking in complex scenes

A recently proposed colour based tracking algorithm has been established to track objects in real circumstances [Zivkovic, Z., Kröse, B. 2004. An EM-like algorithm for color-histogram-based object tracking. In: Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 798-803]. To improve the performance of this technique in complex scenes, in this paper we propose a new algorithm for optimally adapting the ellipse outlining the objects of interest. This paper presents a Lagrangian based method to integrate a regularising component into the covariance matrix to be computed. Technically, we intend to reduce the residuals between the estimated probability distribution and the expected one. We argue that, by doing this, the shape of the ellipse can be properly adapted in the tracking stage. Experimental results show that the proposed method has favourable performance in shape adaption and object localisation.