Histogram Equalization Based Color Space Quantization for the Enhancement of Mean-Shift Tracking Algorithm

Abstract

Kernel-based mean-shift object tracking has gained more interests nowadays, with the aid of its feasibility of reliable real-time implementation of object tracking. This algorithm calculates the best mean-shift vector based on the color histogram similarity between target model and target candidate models, where the color histograms are usually produced after uniform color-space quantization for the implementation of real-time tracker. However, when the image of target model has a reduced contrast, such uniform quantization produces the histogram model having large values only for a few histogram bins, resulting in a reduced accuracy of similarity comparison. To solve this problem, a non-uniform quantization algorithm has been proposed, but it is hard to apply to real-time tracking applications due to its high complexity. Therefore, this paper proposes a fast non-uniform color-space quantization method using the histogram equalization, providing an adjusted histogram distribution such that the bins of target model histogram have as many meaningful values as possible. Using the proposed method, the number of bins involved in similarity comparison has been increased, resulting in an enhanced accuracy of the proposed mean-shift tracker. Simulations with various test videos demonstrate the proposed algorithm provides similar or better tracking results to the previous non-uniform quantization scheme with significantly reduced computation complexity.