Multiple object tracking using particle filters

The particle filtering technique with multiple cues such as colour, texture and edges as observation features is a powerful technique for tracking deformable objects in image sequences with complex backgrounds. In this paper, our recent work [1] on single object tracking using particle filters is extended to multiple objects. In the proposed scheme, track initialisation is embedded in the particle filter without relying on an external object detection scheme. The proposed scheme avoids the use of hybrid state estimation for the estimation of number of active objects and its associated state vectors as proposed in [2]. The number of active objects and track management are handled by means of probabilities of the number of active objects in a given frame. These probabilities are shown to be easily estimated by the Monte Carlo data association algorithm used in our algorithm. The proposed particle filter (PF) embeds a data association technique based on the joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) which handles the uncertainty of the measurement origin. The algorithm is able to cope with partial occlusions and to recover the tracks after temporary loss. The probabilities calculated for data associations take part in the calculation of probabilities of the number of objects. We evaluate the performance of the proposed filter on various real-world video sequences with appearing and disappearing targets