Object tracking using the Gabor wavelet transform and the golden section algorithm

• Published in: IEEE transactions on multimedia Vol. 4; no. 4; pp. 528 - 538
• Main Authors: Chao He, Zheng, Y.F., Ahalt, S.C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.12.2002; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Chaos; Indexing; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; Motion estimation; Similarity; Studies; Tracking; Triangles; Two dimensional; Two dimensional displays; Vectors (mathematics); Video compression; Video sequences; Wavelet domain; Wavelet transforms
• ISSN: 1520-9210; 1941-0077
• DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2002.806534

The paper presents an object tracking method for object-based video processing which uses a two-dimensional (2D) Gabor wavelet transform (GWT) and a 2D golden section algorithm. An object in the current frame is modeled by local features from a number of the selected feature points, and the global placement of these feature points. The feature points are stochastically selected based on the energy of their GWT coefficients. Points with higher energy have a higher probability of being selected since they are visually more important. The amplitudes of the GWT coefficients of a feature point are then used as the local feature. The global placement of the feature points is determined by a 2D mesh whose feature is the area of the triangles formed by the feature points. In this way, a local feature is represented by a GWT coefficient amplitude vector, and a global feature is represented by a triangle area vector. One advantage of the 2D mesh is that the direction of its triangle area vector is invariant to affine transform. Consequently, the similarity between two local features or two global features can be defined as a function of the angle and the length ratio between two vectors, and the overall similarity between two objects is a weighted sum of the local and global similarities. In order to find the corresponding object in the next frame, the 2D golden section algorithm is employed. Our results show that the method is robust to object deformation and supports object tracking in noisy video sequences.