Kernelised correlation filters target tracking fused multi‐feature based on the unmanned aerial vehicle platform

Abstract

Abstract As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) emerged as a flexible acquisition system that is widely used in military and civilian fields, efficient target tracking algorithm is in urgent need for UAV‐based computer vision. Although research studies have been reported on typical interferences in the tracking process such as scale change, occlusion, distortion etc., some issues still exist for the target tracking algorithm based on UAV vision. This study exploited the features hidden in different colour spaces, and proposed a multi‐feature multi‐filter fusion tracking method that combines the HSV (hue, saturation and value) colour space with the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature. The HSV colour space is proved to be able to discriminate objects under different conditions. The HOG of each HSV channel is utilised to train Kernelised correlation filters (KCF), respectively. The final tracking result is the candidate result with the biggest peak sidelobe ratio (PSR). Computer simulations proved that the fusion strategy proposed in this study can effectively improve the tracking performance of the tracker especially when the image sequences are interfered by deformation, occlusion, low resolution, etc. The performance of the tracker is also tested on UAV.

Keywords

• computer vision
• feature extraction
• image colour analysis
• image fusion
• image sequences
• object detection