A Comparative Study of Illumination Invariant Techniques in Video Tracking Perspective

Object tracking is being utilized in the field of computer vision over decades for video surveillance, human–computer interaction and robotic applications. Even though the state-of-the-art tracking technology is rapidly growing, few issues are still challenging such as illumination variation, pose variation, scale changes, occlusion, etc. Among these challenges, sudden illumination variation is more complicated which is not solved completely. Most of the current trackers, indeed work under controlled illumination conditions in outdoor and indoor environments. In this work, we study the effect of adding the photometric normalization techniques prior to tracking in order to minimize the drift during abrupt light changes of the median flow tracker (MFT). The tracker under investigation is based on the optical flow method and achieved remarkable results in the tracking literature. However, it drifts off during sudden illumination variation. To resolve this problem, pre-processing technique is incorporated just before tracking. Hence, we present an experimental study of various pre-processing techniques to improve the accuracy of the MFT. A total of eight state-of-the-art normalization techniques are summarized and tested in video tracking perspective. The experiments are carried out with the video sequences obtained from the object tracking benchmark dataset posing sudden illumination change as a challenge to analyze the modified tracker. A comparative analysis indicates that the modified tracker outperforms the baseline tracker in terms of precision score and overlap score.