Object tracking using structure-aware binary features

Object tracking is one of the most important components in numerous applications of computer vision. In this paper, the target is represented by a series of binary patterns, where each binary pattern consists of several rectangle pairs in variable size and location. As complementary to traditional binary descriptors, these patterns are extracted in both the intensity domain and the gradient domain. In the tracking process, the RealAdaBoost algorithm is adopted frame by frame to select the meaningful patterns while considering the discriminative ability and the robustness. This is achieved by a penalty term based on the classification margin and structural diversity. As a result, the features good at describing the target and robust to noises will be selected. Experimental results on 10 challenging video sequences demonstrate that the tracking accuracy is significantly improved compared to traditional binary descriptors. It also achieves competitive results with the commonly-used algorithms.