Abrupt motion tracking using a visual saliency embedded particle filter

Abrupt motion is a significant challenge that commonly causes traditional tracking methods to fail. This paper presents an improved visual saliency model and integrates it to a particle filter tracker to solve this problem. Once the target is lost, our algorithm recovers tracking by detecting the target region from salient regions, which are obtained in the saliency map of current frame. In addition, to strengthen the saliency of target region, the target model is used as a prior knowledge to calculate a weight set which is utilized to construct our improved saliency map adaptively. Furthermore, we adopt the covariance descriptor as the appearance model to describe the object more accurately. Compared with several other tracking algorithms, the experimental results demonstrate that our method is more robust in dealing with various types of abrupt motion scenarios. •Our method is robust in dealing with abrupt motion tracking.•Target model is first used to compute weights for salient features.•We improve classical saliency model to increase target saliency.•Our improved saliency model is integrated into particle filter tracking.•Our tracker can recover tracking even under global illumination changes.