The Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift Algorithm (CamShift) is an adaptation of the Mean Shift algorithm for object tracking that is intended as a step towards head and face tracking for a perceptual user interface. In this paper, we review the CamShift Algorithm and extend a default implementation to allow tracking in an arbitrary number and type of feature spaces. In order to compute the new probability that a pixel value belongs to the target model, we weight the multidimensional histogram with a simple monotonically decreasing kernel profile prior to histogram back-projection. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach by comparing the results with a generic implementation of the Mean Shift algorithm in a quantized feature space of equivalent dimension. The aim if this paper is to examine the effectiveness of the CamShift algorithm as a general-purpose object tracking approach in the case where no assumptions have been made about the target to be tracked.
John G. Allen, Richard Y. D. Xu, Jesse S. Jin