Robust Object Tracking by Nonlinear Learning

We propose a method that obtains a discriminative visual dictionary and a nonlinear classifier for visual tracking tasks in a sparse coding manner based on the globally linear approximation for a nonlinear learning theory. Traditional discriminative tracking methods based on sparse representation learn a dictionary in an unsupervised way and then train a classifier, which may not generate both descriptive and discriminative models for targets by treating dictionary learning and classifier learning separately. In contrast, the proposed tracking approach can construct a dictionary that fully reflects the intrinsic manifold structure of visual data and introduces more discriminative ability in a unified learning framework. Finally, an iterative optimization approach, which computes the optimal dictionary, the associated sparse coding, and a classifier, is introduced. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our tracker achieves a better performance compared with some popular tracking algorithms.