Object Tracking by a Combination of Discriminative Global and Generative Multi-Scale Local Models

Object tracking is a challenging task in many computer vision applications due to occlusion, scale variation and background clutter, etc. In this paper, we propose a tracking algorithm by combining discriminative global and generative multi-scale local models. In the global model, we teach a classifier with sparse discriminative features to separate the target object from the background based on holistic templates. In the multi-scale local model, the object is represented by multi-scale local sparse representation histograms, which exploit the complementary partial and spatial information of an object across different scales. Finally, a collaborative similarity score of one candidate target is input into a Bayesian inference framework to estimate the target state sequentially during tracking. Experimental results on the various challenging video sequences show that the proposed method performs favorably compared to several state-of-the-art trackers.