Integrating the projective transform with particle filtering for visual tracking

This paper presents the projective particle filter, a Bayesian filtering technique integrating the projective transform, which describes the distortion of vehicle trajectories on the camera plane. The characteristics inherent to traffic monitoring, and in particular the projective transform, are integrated in the particle filtering framework in order to improve the tracking robustness and accuracy. It is shown that the projective transform can be fully described by three parameters, namely, the angle of view, the height of the camera, and the ground distance to the first point of capture. This information is integrated in the importance density so as to explore the feature spacemore accurately. By providing a fine distribution of the samples in the feature space, the projective particle filter outperforms the standard particle filter on different tracking measures. First, the resampling frequency is reduced due to a better fit of the importance density for the estimation of the posterior density. Second, the mean squared error between the feature vector estimate and the true state is reduced compared to the estimate provided by the standard particle filter. Third, the tracking rate is improved for the projective particle filter, hence decreasing track loss.