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Visual object tracking, i.e., consistently inferring the motion of a target from image sequences, is a must-have component to bridge low-level image processing and high-level video analysis, which gains great popularity due to its applications in diverse areas, such as human-computer interaction, security video surveillance, medical image processing, and robotics. In this book, we focus on how to enhance the generality and reliability of object-level tracking given no prior knowledge about targets. We propose two novel ideas: context-aware and attentional tracking, where the tracker discovers some auxiliary objects that have short-term motion correlations with the target as the spatial contexts, or augments the observation models by selectively attending discriminative regions inside the target, or adaptively tuning the feature granularity and model elasticity. These approaches achieve promising results on challenging real-world videos. The book sheds some light on recent progress of visual tracking and should be useful to professionals in computer vision research, or anyone else who may be considering utilizing visual tracking in intelligent video analysis systems.

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Dr. Ming Yang is Senior Environmental Economist at an international organization based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the organization, he worked for four years as Energy and Environment Economist and Energy Technology Economist for the International Energy Agency of the OECD in Paris. Before that, he was Energy Adviser and Climate Change Specialist for two years at the Asian Development Bank. Dr Yang is good at quantitative analysis in issues related to economics, engineering, technology and climate change. In 1986, he undertook a feasibility study with MARKAL model on China s Three Gorges Power Plant. In 1994, he simulated negotiation process by using EFOM model. In 2007, with the IEA´s ETP model (the new version of MARKAL) he designed two scenarios for IEA s Energy Technology Perspectives 2008. Over the past two decades, he has about 100 articles published in journals and conference proceedings. He significantly contributed to quantitative analysis and writing of four books on energy and climate change that were published in the Asian Development Bank and the International Energy Agency. Ming holds a Ph.D. in energy economics and planning from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok jointly with l´Institut d´Economie et de Politique de l´Energie (IEPE), Université des Sciences Sociales, Grenoble, France.

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