Fast 2D Hand Tracking with Flocks of Features and Multi-Cue Integration

This paper introduces "Flocks of Features," a fast tracking method for non-rigid and highly articulated objects such as hands. It combines KLT features and a learned foreground color distribution to facilitate 2D position tracking from a monocular view. The tracker\´s benefits lie in its speed, its robustness against background noise, and its ability to track objects that undergo arbitrary rotations and vast and rapid deformations. We demonstrate tracker performance on hand tracking with a non-stationary camera in unconstrained indoor and outdoor environments. The tracker yields over threefold improvement over a CamShift tracker in terms of the number of frames tracked before the target was lost, and often more than one order of magnitude improvement in terms of the fractions of particular test sequences tracked successfully.