Paper: IEEE CVPR (2005) "Tracking multiple objects through occlusions"

Huang, Y and Essa, I. (2005) “Tracking multiple objects through occlusions”,  In Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2005 (CVPR 2005), Volume: 2 page(s): 1051 – 1058 vol. 2, ISSN: 1063-6919, ISBN: 0-7695-2372-2, INSPEC Accession Number:8633324 DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2005.350, [IEEEXplore#] 20-25 June 2005

ABSTRACT

We present an approach for tracking varying number of objects through both temporally and spatially significant occlusions. Our method builds on the idea of object permanence to reason about occlusions. To this end, tracking is performed at both the region level and the object level. At the region level, a customized genetic algorithm is used to search for optimal region tracks. This limits the scope of object trajectories. At the object level, each object is located based on adaptive appearance models, spatial distributions and inter-occlusion relationships. The proposed architecture is capable of tracking objects even in the presence of long periods of full occlusions. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by experimenting on several videos of a user interacting with a variety of objects on a desktop.