An approach towards object tracking in video based on

Complex Wavelet Transforms

Om Prakash and Ashish Khare
Department of Electronics & Communication
University of Allahabad, Allahabad, India
au.omprakash@gmail.com, ashishkhare@hotmail.com

Abstract
Moving object tracking in video scenes has attracted many researchers of
computer vision. Object tracking has a significant role in several important applications
such as Security and surveillance. This paper proposes an approach toward object
tracking in video scene. The proposed method handles partial as well as full occlusion of
object. Firstly, the user specifies a rectangle around the objects boundary in the reference
frame. Then, a Feature Vector (FV) for each pixel in the rectangle is constructed by using
the coefficients of complex wavelet transform. The search window is updated at each
frame based on the interframe texture analysis.

Keywords: Object tracking, Complex wavelet transform, Feature vector.

1. Introduction:
Tracking is a significant and difficult problem that arouses interest among
computer vision [1] researchers. The objective of tracking is to establish correspondence
of objects and object parts between consecutive frames of video. Tracking [2] has been a
drudgery task to apply in complex situations due to erroneous segmentation of objects.
Common problems of erroneous segmentation are long shadows, partial and full
occlusion of objects with each other in the scene. Thus, dealing with shadows at motion
detection level and coping with occlusions both at segmentation level and at tracking
level is important for robust tracking.
Object tracking and its applications are found in many diverse areas including medical
imaging [2, 3], recognition and interpretation of objects in a scene [3, 4], video
surveillance, target detection and identification [3] etc.
Various spatial and frequency domain techniques are used for these applications,
but most recently and widely used technique uses wavelet transforms for such
applications [5]. However the form of wavelet used in these techniques have some major
drawbacks [6]. To overcome these drawbacks some new form of wavelet transform like
complex wavelet transform has been used, which give better results in many applications.
The major limitations of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are its shift sensitivity, poor
directionality and absence of phase information. These limitations are removed or at least

82
reduced by using complex wavelet transforms. There are different types of complex
wavelet transforms which are useful for tracking of the non-rigid objects in video data
like Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform [6], Projection based Complex Wavelet
Transform [7], Steerable Pyramid Complex Wavelet Transform [8] etc. All these
transforms suffer from high computational cost therefore we have chosen DTCxWT and
used it for tracking of objects in video sequences.
DTCxWT possesses the shift invariance property [9] and rotation invariance
[10] properties which are useful in segmentation and tracking of objects in different
scenes. Most researchers have used DTCxWT for tracking of rigid objects. Although in
some cases Daubechies Complex Wavelet Transform has also been used used [11]. For
many applications it is important that transform be invertible. Few authors, Lawton
(1993) and Belzier, Lina & Villasenor(1995), have done the experiments with the
standard polynomials and obtained perfect reconstruction (PR) of complex filters, which
still suffers from poor frequency selectivity. N.G. Kingsbury in 1998 has introduced a
complex wavelet transform called DTCxWT which gives Perfect Reconstruction and
other properties like shift-invariance and directional selectivity.
Rest of the paper is divided into three sections, introduction of complex
wavelets has been given in section 2, section 3 describes the proposed method and its
implementation. At last, the section 4 of this paper is describing the conclusions and
future scope.

2. Overview Of Complex Wavelet Transforms:

Although different researchers have shown the magical role of the wavelet
transform. But, these suffers form the serious disadvantages of shift sensitivity and poor
directionality. One solution of the above shortcomings is the use of Complex Wavelet
Transform.
The wavelet transform of a continuous time signal, x(t), is defined as:

1
T(a, b) =
a
Where

bt
dt
a

x(t ) *

* (t) is the complex conjugate of the mother wavelet function (t), a is the

dilation parameter and b is the location parameter of the wavelet. For complex wavelets
the Fourier transform must be real and vanish for negative frequencies. With smaller
redundancy, the wavelet transform which is approximately shift-invariant is explained by
Kingsbury. After that a more accurate shift-invariant transform with improved
orthogonality and symmetry properties had been proposed and explained. An example of
this decomposition in 1-D case is shown in figure 1. After the subsampling operation, the
filters of the first decomposition level correspond to a biorthogonal filter banks that
retains the even and odd components for tree a and tree b respectively. All filters from

83
second or higher levels are of even length. These trees correspond to the real and
imaginary components of the complex wavelet transform.

2-band reconstruction block

Figure 1: The dual-tree wavelet transform is implemented using two filter banks on same
data. The upper tree a represents the real and tree b represents the imaginary part of the
complex wavelet transform.

84
3. THE PROPOSED TRACKING METHOD:
3.1 OVERVIEW: The general overview of the proposed method is shown as in the
following block diagram:

The steps can be summarized as follows:

(1). Decompose the video into the number of frames
(2). Take the first frame as reference frame and draw the rectangle around the
object of interest.
(3). Draw the rectangle in the reference frame called search region, in which the
object is desired to be searched.
(4). Generate feature vector of each pixel in both object window and search
window.
(5). Move the search window across the search region in any one of the all
possible eight directions which is the direction of the region.
(6). Find the best match for region in the search window by calculating the
minimum sum of the Euclidean distances between the FVs of the pixels of
search regions and FVs of the pixels within region r.
(7). Update the search window.
3.2 FEATURE VECTOR GENERATION:
Any signal x can be decomposed as -

85
where

wiH , wiV , wiD and wiA represent i th level complex wavelet coefficients at

horizontal, vertical, diagonal and approximation level respectively.

The feature vector of each pixel (x, y) can be written as-

3.3 THE SEARCH WINDOW UPDATING PROCEDURE

The proper search window location ensures that the object always lies within the
search area and thus prevents loss of the object inside the search window. A locationadaptive fixed size search window decreases computational complexity that is resulted by
a large and variable size search window. If a moving target is occluded by another object,
use of direction of motion may alleviate the occlusion problem.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE SCOPE:
The proposed approach is suitable for tracking of the object in complex videos
and capable of handling the partial as well as full occlusion because of the use of the
complex wavelet coefficients. Complex wavelet transform possesses a very important
property of shift invariance. This property helps in efficient design of tracking algorithm.
The algorithm can be extended to the multiple objects tracking in videos.

References:
1.
2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

A. K. Jain, Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing; Prentice Hall of India Pvt.

Ltd., New Delhi, 2001
R. Anderson, N. Kingsbury and J. Fauqueur: Coarse level Object Recognition
using interlevel products of complex wavelets, Proc. IEEE conf. on Image
Processing, Genoa, Sept 2005.
Zo M. Budimlija, Mi Leckpammer, Dorota Popiolek, Franz Fogt, Mechthild,
Forenderick R.Bieber, Forensic Applications of Micro Capture Laser
Dissections: Use in DNA-Based Parentage Testing and Plateform Validation,
Croat Med J 2005; 46(4):pp.549-555.
M Aksela. Handwritten Character Recognition: A Palmtop Implementation and
Adaptive Committee Experiments. Masters Thesis, Helsinki University of
Technology, 2000.
N G Kingsbury and J F A Magarey: Wavelet Transforms in Image
Processing, Proc. First European Conference on Signal Analysis and Prediction,
Prague, June 24-27, 1997, pp 23-34.
I W Selesnick, R G Baraniuk and N G Kingsbury: The Dual-Tree Complex
Wavelet Transform, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol 22, no ,6 pp 123151, Nov.2005.
F.C.A. Fernandes, R. L. C. Spaendonck, and C.S. Burrus,A new framework for
complex wavelet transform, IEEE Transactions on Signal processing , vol.51,
no.7, pp.1825-1837, 2003.

86
8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

A.A. Bharath and J.Ng, A Steerable complex wavelet construction and its
applications to image denoising, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing,
vol.14, no.7, pp.948-959, 2005.
N G Kingsbury: Shift invariant Properties of the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet
Transform, Proc. IEEE Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing,
Phoenix, AZ, paper SPTM 3.6, March 16-19, 1999.
N Kingsbury: Rotation-invariant local feature matching with complex
wavelets, Proc. European Conference on Signal Processing (EUSIPCO),
Florence, 4-8 Sept 2006, paper#1568982135.
A. Khare and U. S. Tiwary: Daubechies Complex Wavelet Transform Based
Moving Object Tracking, IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in
Image and Signal Processing 2007. CIISP 2007, 36-40.
D.P Huttenlocher, J.J Noh, W.J Rucklidge,. Tracking non-rigid objects in
complex scenes, Computer Vision, 1993. Proceedings. Fourth International
Conference on Volume, Issue, 11-14 May 1993 pp:93 101.
D. Xu, J. Hwang, J. Yu, "An accurate region based object tracking for video
sequences," IEEE 3rd Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, pp. 271 276, 1999.
C. E. Erdem, A. M. Tekalp, B. Sankur, Video Object Tracking With Feedback
of Performance Measures, IEEE Transaction for Circuit and Systems for Video
Technology, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 310-324, 2003.
Y. Chen, Y. Rui, and T. S. Huang, JPDAF based HMM for real-time contour
tracking, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,
pp. 543550, 2001.
M. Khansari, H. R. Rabiee, M. Asadi, and M. Ghanbari, Object Tracking in
Crowded Video Scenes Based on the Undecimated Wavelet Features and
Texture Analysis, in EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 243534, 18 pages doi:10.1155/2008/243534