Robust infants face tracking using active appearance models: a mixed-state CONDENSATION approach

In this paper a new extension of the CONDENSATION algorithm, with application to infants face tracking, will be introduced. In this work we address the problem of tracking a face and its features in baby video sequences. A mixed state particle filtering scheme is proposed, where the distribution of observations is derived from an active appearance model. The mixed state approach combines several dynamic models in order to account for different occlusion situations. Experiments on real video show that the proposed approach augments the tracker robustness to occlusions while maintaining the computational time competitive.