Moving vehicle tracking based on improved tracking–learning–detection algorithm

Abstract

This study addresses the tracking–learning–detection (TLD) algorithm for long‐term single‐target tracking of moving vehicle from video streams. The problems leading to tracking failures in existing TLD methods are discovered, and an improved TLD (ITLD) tracking algorithm is proposed which is more robust to object occlusion and illumination variation. A square root cubature Kalman filter (SRCKF) is employed in the tracker of TLD to predict the position of the object when occlusion occurs. Besides, this study introduces fast retina keypoint (FREAK) feature into the tracker to alleviate the instability caused by illumination variation or scale variation. The overlap comparison and the normalised cross‐correlation coefficient (NCC) are introduced to the integrator of the TLD to obtain reliable bounding boxes with improved tracking precision. Experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the state‐of‐the‐art trackers and the proposed method, using the object tracking benchmark that includes 50 video sequences (OTB‐50) and TLD datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed ITLD outperforms on both tracking accuracy and robustness. The proposed method can track a moving vehicle even when it is temporally totally occluded.