Learning local appearances with sparse representation for robust and fast visual tracking

In this paper, we present a novel appearance model using sparse representation and online dictionary learning techniques for visual tracking. In our approach, the visual appearance is represented by sparse representation, and the online dictionary learning strategy is used to adapt the appearance variations during tracking. We unify the sparse representation and online dictionary learning by defining a sparsity consistency constraint that facilitates the generative and discriminative capabilities of the appearance model. An elastic-net constraint is enforced during the dictionary learning stage to capture the characteristics of the local appearances that are insensitive to partial occlusions. Hence, the target appearance is effectively recovered from the corruptions using the sparse coefficients with respect to the learned sparse bases containing local appearances. In the proposed method, the dictionary is undercomplete and can thus be efficiently implemented for tracking. Moreover, we employ a median absolute deviation based robust similarity metric to eliminate the outliers and evaluate the likelihood between the observations and the model. Finally, we integrate the proposed appearance model with the particle filter framework to form a robust visual tracking algorithm. Experiments on benchmark video sequences show that the proposed appearance model outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches in tracking performance.