Multi-scale 2D tracking of articulated objects using hierarchical spring systems

This paper presents a flexible framework to build a target-specific, part-based representation for arbitrary articulated or rigid objects. The aim is to successfully track the target object in 2D, through multiple scales and occlusions. This is realized by employing a hierarchical, iterative optimization process on the proposed representation of structure and appearance. Therefore, each rigid part of an object is described by a hierarchical spring system represented by an attributed graph pyramid. Hierarchical spring systems encode the spatial relationships of the features (attributes of the graph pyramid) describing the parts and enforce them by spring-like behavior during tracking. Articulation points connecting the parts of the object allow to transfer position information from reliable to ambiguous parts. Tracking is done in an iterative process by combining the hypotheses of simple trackers with the hypotheses extracted from the hierarchical spring systems.