Adaptive Discriminative Generative Model for Object Tracking

This paper presents an adaptive visual learning algorithm for object tracking. We formulate a novel discriminative generative framework that generalizes the conventional Fisher Linear Discriminant algorithm with a generative model and renders a proper probabilistic interpretation. Within the context of object tracking, we aim to find a discriminative generative model that best separates the target class from the background. We present a computationally efficient algorithm to constantly update this discriminative model as time progresses. While most tracking algorithms operate on the premise that the object appearance or environment lighting condition does not significantly change as time progresses, our method adapts the discriminative generative model to reflect appearance variation of the target and background, thereby facilitating the tracking task in different situations. Numerous experiments show that our method is able to learn a discriminative generative model for tracking target objects undergoing large pose and lighting changes.