Robust tracking of objects with dynamic topology
Padraig Corcoran, Christopher B. Jones · 2018
In many instances of the object tracking problem the topological properties of objects can change over time. Such changes include the splitting of an object into multiple objects or merging of multiple objects into a single object. We propose a novel tracking model which is robust to such changes. This model is formulated terms of homology theory whereby 0-dimensional homology classes, which correspond to path-connected components, are tracked. A generalisation of this model for tracking spatially close objects lying in an ambient metric space is also proposed. This generalisation is particularly suitable for tracking spatial-temporal phenomena such as weather phenomena. The utility of the proposed model is demonstrated with respect to tracking rain clouds in radar imagery.