Randomized Ensemble Tracking

We propose a randomized ensemble algorithm to model the time-varying appearance of an object for visual tracking. In contrast with previous online methods for updating classifier ensembles in tracking-by-detection, the weight vector that combines weak classifiers is treated as a random variable and the posterior distribution for the weight vector is estimated in a Bayesian manner. In essence, the weight vector is treated as a distribution that reflects the confidence among the weak classifiers used to construct and adapt the classifier ensemble. The resulting formulation models the time-varying discriminative ability among weak classifiers so that the ensembled strong classifier can adapt to the varying appearance, backgrounds, and occlusions. The formulation is tested in a tracking-by-detection implementation. Experiments on 28 challenging benchmark videos demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve results comparable to and often better than those of state-of-the-art approaches.