Abstract:Object tracking is a crucial step in video analysis, as well as detection and recognition. Particle filter, based on color histogram, is considered among multiple approaches that prove their effectiveness in this domain. It is apparent that if an object and its background, or more objects to be tracked, having nearly the same color histogram, the quality of tracking will be negatively affected. Therefore, combining color histogram and texture features for pixels in motion is considered a potential solution to this issue. In this paper, we propose a particle filter tracking method consisting of two stages: at the prediction stage, the state space model is represented by Box-Muller transform, and at the correction stage, the observation likelihood model is calculated in three steps: firstly, the background subtraction is used to extract the moving objects in order to reduce the impact of background pixels on color histogram. Secondly, the texture Gabor features are computed using moving pixels to distinguish between objects having the same color histogram. Finally, the histogram and texture features are combined to define a likelihood observation model. The proposed method is implemented using several video sequences. The visual and numerical results obtained are compared with those of traditional particle filter method, and show that our method is very efficient particularly in case of similar objects, and clearly improves the quality of tracking.