Real-time visual tracking using compressive sensing

The ℓ₁ tracker obtains robustness by seeking a sparse representation of the tracking object via ℓ₁ norm minimization. However, the high computational complexity involved in the ℓ₁ tracker may hamper its applications in real-time processing scenarios. Here we propose Real-time Com-pressive Sensing Tracking (RTCST) by exploiting the signal recovery power of Compressive Sensing (CS). Dimensionality reduction and a customized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm are adopted to accelerate the CS tracking. As a result, our algorithm achieves a realtime speed that is up to 5,000 times faster than that of the ℓ₁ tracker. Meanwhile, RTCST still produces competitive (sometimes even superior) tracking accuracy compared to the ℓ₁ tracker. Furthermore, for a stationary camera, a refined tracker is designed by integrating a CS-based background model (CSBM) into tracking. This CSBM-equipped tracker, termed RTCST-B, outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Finally, our experimental results on various video sequences, which are verified by a new metric - Tracking Success Probability (TSP), demonstrate the excellence of the proposed algorithms.