A feature tracking algorithm using neighborhood relaxation with multi-candidate pre-screening

Tracking of features in video sequences has many applications. Conventionally, the minimum displaced frame difference (referred to as DFD or residue) of a block of pixels is used as the criterion for tracking in block-matching algorithms (BMA). However, such a criterion often misses the true motion vectors, due to many practical factors, e.g. affine warping, image noise, object occlusion, lighting variation, and existence of multiple minimal DFD. Our goal is to find motion vectors of the features for object-based motion tracking, in which (1) any region of an object contains a good number of blocks, whose motion vectors exhibit certain consistency; and (2) only true motion vectors for a few blocks per region are needed. Hence, we propose a new tracking method. (1) At the outset, we disqualify some of the reference blocks which are considered to be unreliable to track. (2) We adopt a multi-candidate pre-screening to provide some robustness in selecting motion candidates. (3) Assuming the true motion field is piecewise continuous, we determine the motion of a feature block by consulting all its neighboring blocks' directions. This allows for the chance that a singular and erroneous motion vector may be corrected by its surrounding motion vectors (just like median filtering). Our method is also designed for tracking more flexible affine-type motions, such as rotation, zooming, sheering, etc. Finally, the performance improvement over other existing methods is demonstrated.