Moving Camera-Based Object Tracking Using Adaptive Ground Plane Estimation and Constrained Multiple Kernels

Moving camera-based object tracking method for the intelligent transportation system (ITS) has drawn increasing attention. The unpredictability of driving environments and noise from the camera calibration, however, make conventional ground plane estimation unreliable and adversely affecting the tracking result. In this paper, we propose an object tracking system using an adaptive ground plane estimation algorithm, facilitated with constrained multiple kernel (CMK) tracking and Kalman filtering, to continuously update the location of moving objects. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the structure from motion (SfM) to estimate the pose of moving camera, and then the estimated camera’s yaw angle is used as a feedback to improve the accuracy of the ground plane estimation. To further robustly and efficiently tracking objects under occlusion, the constrained multiple kernel tracking technique is adopted in the proposed system to track moving objects in 3D space (depth). The proposed system is evaluated on several challenging datasets, and the experimental results show the favorable performance, which not only can efficiently track on-road objects in a dashcam equipped on a free-moving vehicle but also can well handle occlusion in the tracking.