Visual object tracking using Fourier domain phase information

Abstract

In this article, phase of the Fourier transform (FT), which has observed to be a crucial component in image representation, is utilized for visual target tracking. The main aim of the proposed scheme is to reduce the computational complexity of cross-correlation-based matching frameworks. Normalized cross-correlation (NCC) function-based object tracker is converted to a phase minimization problem under the following assumption: In visual object tracking applications, if the frame rate is high, the moving object can be considered to have translational shifts in image domain in a small time window. Since the proposed tracking framework works in the Fourier domain, the translational shifts in the image space are converted to phase variations in the Fourier domain due to the “translational invariance” property of the FT. The proposed algorithm estimates the spatial target position based on the phase information of the target region. The proposed framework uses the ℓ1-norm and provides a computationally efficient solution for the tracking problem. Experimental studies indicate that the proposed phase-based technique obtain comparable results with baseline tracking algorithms which are computationally more complex.