Appearance models for occlusion handling

Objects in the world exhibit complex interactions. When captured in a video sequence, some interactions manifest themselves as occlusions. A visual tracking system must be able to track objects, which are partially or even fully occluded. In this paper we present a method of tracking objects through occlusions using appearance models. These models are used to localize objects during partial occlusions, detect complete occlusions and resolve depth ordering of objects during occlusions. This paper presents a tracking system which successfully deals with complex real world interactions, as demonstrated on the PETS 2001 dataset. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.