Robust Online Object Tracking with a Structured Sparse Representation Model

As one of the most important issues in computer vision and image processing, online object tracking plays a key role in numerous areas of research and in many real applications. In this study, we present a novel tracking method based on the proposed structured sparse representation model, in which the tracked object is assumed to be sparsely represented by a set of object and background templates. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, the structure information of all the candidate samples is utilized by a joint sparse representation model, where the representation coefficients of these candidates are promoted to share the same sparse patterns. This representation model can be effectively solved by the simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit method. In addition, we develop a tracking algorithm based on the proposed representation model, a discriminative candidate selection scheme, and a simple model updating method. Finally, we conduct numerous experiments on several challenging video clips to evaluate the proposed tracker in comparison with various state-of-the-art tracking algorithms. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on a number of challenging video clips show that our tracker achieves better performance than the other state-of-the-art methods.