Visual tracking using learned color features

Robust object tracking is a challenging task in computer vision. Color features have been popularly used in visual tracking. However, most conventional color-based trackers either rely on luminance information or use simple color representations for image description. During the tracking sequences, the perceived color of the target may change because of the varying lighting conditions. In this paper, we learn the color patterns offline from pixels sampled from images across different camera views. In the new color feature space, the proposed tracking method performs robustly in various environment. The new color feature space is learned by learning a linear transformation and a dictionary to encode pixel values. To speedup the feature extraction, we use the marginal regression to calculate the sparse feature codes. Experimental results demonstrate that significant improvement can be achieved by using our learned color features, especially on the video sequences with complicated lighting conditions.