Confidence-Based Dynamic Classifier Combination For Mean-Shift Tracking

We introduce a novel tracking technique which uses dynamic confidence-based fusion of two different information sources for robust and efficient tracking of visual objects. Mean-shift tracking is a popular and well known method used in object tracking problems. Originally, the algorithm uses a similarity measure which is optimized by shifting a search area to the center of a generated weight image to track objects. Recent improvements on the original mean-shift algorithm involves using a classifier that differentiates the object from its surroundings. We adopt this classifier-based approach and propose an application of a classifier fusion technique within this classifier-based context in this work. We use two different classifiers, where one comes from a background modeling method, to generate the weight image and we calculate contributions of the classifiers dynamically using their confidences to generate a final weight image to be used in tracking. The contributions of the classifiers are calculated by using correlations between histograms of their weight images and histogram of a defined ideal weight image in the previous frame. We show with experiments that our dynamic combination scheme selects good contributions for classifiers for different cases and improves tracking accuracy significantly.