Robust Mean Shift Tracking with Corrected Background-Weighted Histogram

The background-weighted histogram (BWH) algorithm proposed in [2] attempts to reduce the interference of background in target localization in mean shift tracking. However, in this paper we prove that the weights assigned to pixels in the target candidate region by BWH are proportional to those without background information, i.e. BWH does not introduce any new information because the mean shift iteration formula is invariant to the scale transformation of weights. We then propose a corrected BWH (CBWH) formula by transforming only the target model but not the target candidate model. The CBWH scheme can effectively reduce background’s interference in target localization. The experimental results show that CBWH can lead to faster convergence and more accurate localization than the usual target representation in mean shift tracking. Even if the target is not well initialized, the proposed algorithm can still robustly track the object, which is hard to achieve by the conventional target representation.