Dynamic swarm particle for fast motion vehicle tracking

Nowadays, the broad availability of cameras and embedded systems makes the application of computer vision very promising as a supporting technology for intelligent transportation systems, particularly in the field of vehicle tracking. Although there are several existing trackers, the limitation of using low-cost cameras, besides the relatively low processing power in embedded systems, makes most of these trackers useless. For the tracker to work under those conditions, the video frame rate must be reduced to decrease the burden on computation. However, doing this will make the vehicle seem to move faster on the observer's side. This phenomenon is called the fast motion challenge. This paper proposes a tracker called dynamic swarm particle (DSP), which solves the challenge. The term particle refers to the particle filter, while the term swarm refers to particle swarm optimization (PSO). The fundamental concept of our method is to exploit the continuity of vehicle dynamic motions by creating dynamic models based on PSO. Based on the experiments, DSP achieves a precision of 0.896 and success rate of 0.755. These results are better than those obtained by several other benchmark trackers.