Online multi-person tracking based on global sparse collaborative representations

Multi-person tracking is still a challenging problem due to recurrent occlusion, pose variation and similar appearances between people. Inspired by the success of sparse representations in single object tracking and face recognition, we propose in this paper an online tracking by detection framework based on collaborative sparse representations. We argue that collaborative representations can better differentiate people compared to target-specific models and therefore help to produce a more robust tracking system. We also show that despite the size of the dictionaries involved, these representations can be efficiently computed with large-scale optimization techniques to get a near real-time algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed approach compares well to other recent online tracking systems on various datasets.