Feature points tracking adaptive to saturation

This paper proposes a color tracking strategy designed to improve the robustness against luminance and saturation changes due to illumination variations. On the one hand, color is helpful in terms of photometric invariance and separability power. On the other hand, it is more costly in time and resources and most color invariants are ill-defined at low saturation. To answer these issues, the proposed method weights the color and luminance information adaptively with respect to the current color saturation. A particular attention is also given to chose a color representation with low computational cost. The method is compared to classical color tracking in terms of accuracy, robustness and executing times. The experimental results achieved on several image sequences confirm the good performances of the method.