Bilateral Filtering-based Mean-Shift for Robust Face Tracking

The mean shift algorithm has achieved considerable success in object tracking due to its simplicity and robustness. It finds local minima of a similarity measure between the color histograms or kernel density estimates of the target and candidate image. However, it is sensitive to the noises due to objects or background having similar color distributions. In addition, occlusion by another object often causes a face region to change in size and position although a face region is a critical clue to perform face recognition or compute face orientation. We assume that depth and color are effective to separate a face from a background and a face from objects, respectively. From the assumption we devised a bilateral filter using color and depth and incorporate it into the mean-shift algorithm. We demonstrated the proposed method by some experiments.