Comparison of stochastic filtering methods for 3D tracking

Abstract

In the recent years, the 3D visual research has gained momentum with publications appearing for all aspects of 3D including visual tracking. This paper presents a review of the literature published for 3D visual tracking over the past five years. The work particularly focuses on stochastic filtering techniques such as particle filter and Kalman filter. These two filters are extensively used for tracking due to their ability to consider uncertainties in the estimation. The improvement in computational power of computers and increasing interest in robust tracking algorithms lead to increase in the use of stochastic filters in visual tracking in general and 3D visual tracking in particular. Stochastic filters are used for numerous applications in the literature such as robot navigation, computer games and behavior analysis. Kalman filter is a linear estimator which approximates system's dynamics with Gaussian model while particle filter approximates system's dynamics using weighted samples. In this paper, we investigate the implementation of Kalman and particle filters in the published work and we provide comparison between these techniques qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The quantitative analysis is in terms of computational time and accuracy. The quantitative analysis has been implemented using four parameters of the tracked object which are object position, velocity, size of bounding ellipse and orientation angle.