Kernel-based motion-blurred target tracking

Motion blurs are pervasive in real captured video data, especially for hand-held cameras and smartphone cameras because of their low frame rate and material quality. This paper presents a novel Kernel-based motion-Blurred target Tracking (KBT) approach to accurately locate objects in motion blurred video sequence, without explicitly performing deblurring. To model the underlying motion blurs, we first augment the target model by synthesizing a set of blurred templates from the target with different blur directions and strengths. These templates are then represented by color histograms regularized by an isotropic kernel. To locate the optimal position for each template, we choose to use the mean shift method for iterative optimization. Finally, the optimal region with maximum similarity to its corresponding template is considered as the target. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method, we collect several video sequences with severe motion blurs and compare KBT with other traditional trackers. Experimental results show that our KBT method can robustly and reliably track strong motion blurred targets.