Material Based Object Tracking in Hyperspectral Videos: Benchmark and Algorithms

Abstract: Traditional color images only depict color intensities in red, green and blue channels, often making object trackers fail in challenging scenarios, e.g., background clutter and rapid changes of target appearance. Alternatively, material information of targets contained in a large amount of bands of hyperspectral images (HSI) is more robust to these difficult conditions. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on how material information can be utilized to boost object tracking from three aspects: benchmark dataset, material feature representation and material based tracking. In terms of benchmark, we construct a dataset of fully-annotated videos, which contain both hyperspectral and color sequences of the same scene. Material information is represented by spectral-spatial histogram of multidimensional gradient, which describes the 3D local spectral-spatial structure in an HSI, and fractional abundances of constituted material components which encode the underlying material distribution. These two types of features are embedded into correlation filters, yielding material based tracking. Experimental results on the collected benchmark dataset show the potentials and advantages of material based object tracking.