A method of small object detection and tracking based on particle filters

In this paper an efficient method of small object localization is proposed that integrates detection and tracking. The system is initialized using a strong detector and then it locates the object over time using a weak detector and a temporal tracker. Both of strong and weak detectors are based on foreground-background segmentation. The strong detector is created from shape analysis of foreground blobs and used to trigger the object tracker. The weak detector is built with outputs from the foreground detection likelihood and integrated into the tracker's observation likelihood. In the particle filter-based object tracker, motion estimation is embedded to generate a better proposal distribution and a mixture model is tailored to handle the ambiguity of template matching due to cluttered background. As a case study, the proposed scheme is applied to ball detection and tracking in soccer game videos. Promising results are presented to illustrate the proposed method effectively handles heavy clutter, occlusion and motion blur. ? 2008 IEEE.EI