Visual Tracking Using Sparse Coding and Earth Mover's Distance

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 local sparse representation is used as the appearance model 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. 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 videos from the CVPR 2013 dataset. The performance of the iEMD algorithm is compared with eight state-of-the-art tracking algorithms based on relative percentage overlap. Experimental results show that the iEMD algorithm performs robustly in the presence of illumination variation and deformation. The robustness of this algorithm for large inter-frame displacements is also illustrated.