Evaluation, Design and Application of Object Tracking Technologies for Vehicular Technology Applications

Advances in video technology have enabled its wide adoption in the auto industry. Today, many vehicles are equipped with backup, front-looking, and side-looking cameras that allow the driver to easily monitor the traffic around the vehicle for enhanced safety. This paper reports our research on evaluating many existing object tracking techniques, and proposes a new tracker design and its application for 3D environmental mapping in vehicular technology applications. The contribution of our research is 4-fold: (1) We evaluate a large collection of state-of-the-art trackers using multiple criteria relevant to vehicular technology applications, (2) we show how to derive useful evaluation metrics from public-domain, real-world driving videos that do not come with ground-truth information on pixel tracking, (3) we propose a new tracker that is geared specifically for vehicular technology application and show that it achieves tracking accuracy that outperforms SIFT and is on-par with state-of-the-art optical-flow tracking algorithm, which has the best accuracy in our evaluation. Furthermore, we show that our tracker is 600 times more efficient than optical flow and 7 times more efficient than SIFT, and (4) we validated our new tracker design for 3D environmental map building application and showed that the new tracker can obtain comparable results as SIFT but with a significant saving in runtime.