  A robust and fast automatic moving object detection and tracking system is
essential to characterize target object and extract spatial and temporal
information for different functionalities including video surveillance systems,
urban traffic monitoring and navigation, robotic. In this dissertation, I
present a collaborative Spatial Pyramid Context-aware moving object detection
and Tracking system. The proposed visual tracker is composed of one master
tracker that usually relies on visual object features and two auxiliary
trackers based on object temporal motion information that will be called
dynamically to assist master tracker. SPCT utilizes image spatial context at
different level to make the video tracking system resistant to occlusion,
background noise and improve target localization accuracy and robustness. We
chose a pre-selected seven-channel complementary features including RGB color,
intensity and spatial pyramid of HoG to encode object color, shape and spatial
layout information. We exploit integral histogram as building block to meet the
demands of real-time performance. A novel fast algorithm is presented to
accurately evaluate spatially weighted local histograms in constant time
complexity using an extension of the integral histogram method. Different
techniques are explored to efficiently compute integral histogram on GPU
architecture and applied for fast spatio-temporal median computations and 3D
face reconstruction texturing. We proposed a multi-component framework based on
semantic fusion of motion information with projected building footprint map to
significantly reduce the false alarm rate in urban scenes with many tall
structures. The experiments on extensive VOTC2016 benchmark dataset and aerial
video confirm that combining complementary tracking cues in an intelligent
fusion framework enables persistent tracking for Full Motion Video and Wide
Aerial Motion Imagery.
