Object tracking using color interest points

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for tracking objects in complex situations such as people in a crowd or players on a soccer field. Each object in the image is represented by several interest points (IPs). These IPs are obtained using a color version of the Harris IP detector. Each IP is characterized by the local appearance (chromatic first-order local jet) of the object and by geometric parameters. We track objects by matching IPs from image to image based on the Mahalanobis distance. The approach is robust to occlusion. Performance is illustrated by some examples.