Efficient multiple faces tracking based on Relevance Vector Machine and Boosting learning

A multiple faces tracking system was presented based on Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) and Boosting learning. In this system, a face detector based on Boosting learning is used to detect faces at the first frame, and the face motion model and color model are created. The face motion model consists of a set of RVMs that learn the relationship between the motion of the face and its appearance, and the face color model is the 2D histogram of the face region in CrCb color space. In the tracking process different tracking methods (RVM tracking, local search, giving up tracking) are used according to different states of faces, and the states are changed according to the tracking results. When the full image search condition is satisfied, a full image search is started in order to find new coming faces and former occluded faces. In the full image search and local search, the similarity matrix is introduced to help matching faces efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that this system can (a) automatically find new coming faces; (b) recover from occlusion, for example, if the faces are occluded by others and reappear or leave the scene and return; (c) run with a high computation efficiency, run at about 20 frames/s. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.