ICondensation: Unifying low-level and high-level tracking in a
stochastic framework
Michael Isard and Andrew Blake
Proc 5th European Conf. Computer Vision, Vol. 1 893-908, 1998
Abstract
Tracking research has diverged into two camps; low-level approaches
which are typically fast and robust but provide little fine-scale
information, and high-level approaches which track complex
deformations in high-dimensional spaces but must trade off speed
against robustness. Real-time high-level systems perform poorly in
clutter and initialisation for most high-level systems is either
performed manually or by a separate module. This paper presents a
new technique to combine low- and high-level information in a
consistent probabilistic framework, using the statistical technique
of importance sampling combined with the Condensation algorithm. The
general framework, which we term ICondensation, is described, and a hand
tracker is demonstrated which combines colour blob-tracking with a
contour model. The resulting tracker is robust to rapid motion,
heavy clutter and hand-coloured distractors, and re-initialises
automatically. The system runs comfortably in real time on an
entry-level desktop workstation.
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