Establishing target track history by digital watermarking
Bijan G. Mobasseri, Preethi Krishnamurthy · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Automatic tracking of targets in image sequences is an important capability. Although effective algorithms exist to implement frame to frame registration, connecting the tracks across frames is of recent interest. The current approach to this problem is by building a spatio-temporal graph. In this work we argue that the same rationale used to fingerprint multimedia content for tracing purposes can be used to follow targets across frames. Riding on top of a tracker, tracked targets receive unique watermarks which propagate throughout the video. These watermarks can then be searched for and used in a newly defined target adjacency matrix. The properties of this matrix establishes how target sequencing evolves across frames. The watermarked video is self-contained and does not require buiding and maintaining of a spati-temporal graphs.