Adaptive mean-shift for automated multi object tracking

Mean-shift tracking plays an important role in computer vision applications because of its robustness, ease of implementation and computational efficiency. In this study, a fully automatic multiple-object tracker based on mean-shift algorithm is presented. Foreground is extracted using a mixture of Gaussian followed by shadow and noise removal to initialise the object trackers and also used as a kernel mask to make the system more efficient by decreasing the search area and the number of iterations to converge for the new location of the object. By using foreground detection, new objects entering to the field of view and objects that are leaving the scene could be detected. Trackers are automatically refreshed to solve the potential problems that may occur because of the changes in objects' size, shape, to handle occlusion-split between the tracked objects and to detect newly emerging objects as well as objects that leave the scene. Using a shadow removal method increases the tracking accuracy. As a result, a method that remedies problems of mean-shift tracking and presents an easy to implement, robust and efficient tracking method that can be used for automated static camera video surveillance applications is proposed. Additionally, it is shown that the proposed method is superior to the standard mean-shift. © 2012 © The Institution of Engineering and Technology.