Visual Data Association for Real-Time Video Tracking Using Genetic and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

In this article, an efficient and novel approach for video data association is developed. This new method is formulated as a search across the hypotheses space defined by the possible association among tracks and detections, carried out for each frame of a video sequence. The full data association problem in visual tracking is formulated as a combinatorial hypotheses search with a heuristic evaluation function taking into account structural and specific information such as distance, shape, color, etc. To guarantee real-time performance, a time limit is set for the search process explore alternative solutions. This time limit defines the upper bound of the number of evaluations depending on search algorithm efficiency. Estimation distribution algorithms are proposed as an efficient evolutionary computation technique to search in this hypothesis space. Finally, an exhaustive comparison of the performance of alternative algorithms is carried out considering complex representative situations in real video sets.

Visual Data Association for Real-Time Video Tracking Using Genetic and Estimation of Distribution Algorithms Articles