  This paper presents a long-term object tracking framework with a moving event
camera under general tracking conditions. A first of its kind for these
revolutionary cameras, the tracking framework uses a discriminative
representation for the object with online learning, and detects and re-tracks
the object when it comes back into the field-of-view. One of the key novelties
is the use of an event-based local sliding window technique that tracks
reliably in scenes with cluttered and textured background. In addition,
Bayesian bootstrapping is used to assist real-time processing and boost the
discriminative power of the object representation. On the other hand, when the
object re-enters the field-of-view of the camera, a data-driven, global sliding
window detector locates the object for subsequent tracking. Extensive
experiments demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to track and
detect arbitrary objects of various shapes and sizes, including dynamic objects
such as a human. This is a significant improvement compared to earlier works
that simply track objects as long as they are visible under simpler background
settings. Using the ground truth locations for five different objects under
three motion settings, namely translation, rotation and 6-DOF, quantitative
measurement is reported for the event-based tracking framework with critical
insights on various performance issues. Finally, real-time implementation in
C++ highlights tracking ability under scale, rotation, view-point and occlusion
scenarios in a lab setting.
