Surveillance video object tracking with differential ssim

The recently proposed use of the structural similarity measure, in the particle filter-based video tracker has been shown to improve the tracking performance, compared to similar methods using the colour or edge histograms and Bhattacharyya distance. However, the combined use of the structural similarity and a particle filter results in a computationally complex tracker that may not be suitable for some real time applications. In this paper, a novel fast approach to the use of the structural similarity in video tracking is proposed. The tracking algorithm presented in this work determines the state of the target (location, size) based on the gradient ascent procedure applied to the structural similarity surface of the video frame, thus avoiding computationally expensive sampling of the state space. The new method, while being computationally less expensive, performs better, than the standard mean shift and the structural similarity particle filter trackers, as shown in exemplary surveillance video sequences.