Incremental Focus of Attention for Robust Visual Tracking

We present an incremental focus of attention (IFA) architecture for adding robust-ness to software-based, real-time, motion trackers. The framework provides a structure which, when given the entire camera image to search, eeciently focuses the attention of the system into a narrow set of conngurations that includes the target conngura-tion. IFA ooers a means for automatic tracking initialization and reinitialization when environmental conditions momentarily deteriorate and cause the system to lose track of its target. Systems based on the framework degrade gracefully as various assumptions about the environment are violated. In particular, when constructed with multiple tracking algorithms of varying precision, the failure of a single algorithm causes another, less precise algorithm to take over, thereby allowing the system to return approximate information on feature location or connguration.