Novelty detection with self-organizing maps for autonomous extraction of salient tracking features

International audienceIn the image processing field, many tracking algorithms rely on prior knowledge like color, shape or even need a database of the objects to be tracked. This may be a problem for some real world applications that cannot fill those prerequisite. Based on image compression techniques, we propose to use Self-Organizing Maps to robustly detect novelty in the input video stream and to produce a saliency map which will outline unusual objects in the visual environment. This saliency map is then processed by a Dynamic Neural Field to extract a robust and continuous tracking of the position of the object. Our approach is solely based on unsupervised neural networks and does not need any prior knowledge, therefore it has a high adaptability to different inputs and a strong robustness to noisy environments