Refined particle swarm intelligence method for abrupt motion tracking

Conventional tracking solutions are not able to deal with abrupt motion as these are based on a smooth motion assumption or an accurate motion model. Abrupt motion is not subject to motion continuity and smoothness. We address this problem by casting tracking as an optimisation problem and propose a novel abrupt motion tracker based on swarm intelligence - the SwATrack. Unlike existing swarm-based filtering methods, we first of all introduce an optimised swarm-based sampling strategy for a tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation of the state space in search for the optimal proposal distribution. Secondly, we propose Dynamic Acceleration Parameters (DAP) that allow on the fly tuning of the best mean and variance of the distribution for sampling. Combining the two strategies within the Particle Swarm Optimisation framework represents a novel method to address abrupt motion. To the best of our knowledge, this has never been done before. Thirdly, we introduce a new dataset - the Malaya Abrupt Motion (MAMo) dataset that consists of 12 videos with groundtruth. Finally, experimental on both quantitative and qualitative results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of dataset unbiased, object size invariant and fast recovery in tracking the abrupt motions.