IEEE TRANSACTION ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 3
negative samples are selected via an online classifier with
structural constraints. Wang et al. [30] present a discriminative
appearance model based on superpixels which is able to handle
heavy occlusions and recovery from drift. In [13], Hare et al.
use an online structured output support vector machine (SVM)
for robust tracking which can mitigate the effect of wrong
labeling samples. Recently, Henriques et al. [16] introduce a
fast tracking algorithm which exploits the circulant structure
of the kernel matrix in SVM classifier that can be efficiently
computed by the fast Fourier transform algorithm.
3 PRELIMINARIES
We present some preliminaries of compressive sensing which
are used in the proposed tracking algorithm.
3.1 Random projection and compressive sensing
In random projection, a random matrix R ∈ R
n×m
whose
rows have unit length projects data from the high-dimensional
feature space x ∈ R
m
to a lower-dimensional space v ∈ R
n
v = Rx, (1)
where n m. Each projection v is essentially equivalent
to a compressive measurement in the compressive sensing
encoding stage. The compressive sensing theory [19], [34]
states that if a signal is K-sparse (i.e., the signal is a linear
combination of only K basis [35]), it is possible to near
perfectly reconstruct the signal from a small number of random
measurements. The encoder in compressive sensing (using (1))
correlates signal with noise (using random matrix R) [19],
thereby it is a universal encoding which requires no prior
knowledge of the signal structure. In this paper, we adopt this
encoder to construct the appearance model for visual tracking.
Ideally, we expect R provides a stable embedding that
approximately preserves the salient information in any K-
sparse signal when projecting from x ∈ R
m
to v ∈ R
n
. A
necessary and sufficient condition for this stable embedding is
that it approximately preserves distances between any pairs of
K-sparse signals that share the same K basis. That is, for any
two K-sparse vectors x
1
and x
2
sharing the same K basis,
(1−)kx
1
−x
2
k
2
`
2
≤ kRx
1
−Rx
2
k
2
`
2
≤ (1+)kx
1
−x
2
k
2
`
2
. (2)
The restricted isometry property [18], [19] in compressive
sensing shows the above results. This property is achieved with
high probability for some types of random matrix R whose
entries are identically and independently sampled from a
standard normal distribution, symmetric Bernoulli distribution
or Fourier matrix. Furthermore, the above result can be directly
obtained from the Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) lemma [20].
Lemma 1. (Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma) [20]: Let Q be
a finite collection of d points in R
m
. Given 0 < < 1 and
β > 0, let n be a positive integer such that
n ≥
4 + 2β
2
/2 −
3
/3
ln(d). (3)
Let R ∈ R
n×m
be a random matrix with R(i, j) = r
ij
, where
r
ij
=
+1 with probability
1
2
−1 with probability
1
2
.
(4)
or
r
ij
=
√
3 ×
+1 with probability
1
6
0 with probability
2
3
−1 with probability
1
6
.
(5)
Then, with probability exceeding 1 − d
−β
, the following
statement holds: For every x
1
, x
2
∈ Q,
(1−)kx
1
−x
2
k
2
`
2
≤
1
√
n
kRx
1
−Rx
2
k
2
`
2
≤ (1+)kx
1
−x
2
k
2
`
2
.
(6)
Baraniuk et al. [36] prove that any random matrix satisfying
the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma also holds true for the
restricted isometry property in compressive sensing. Therefore,
if the random matrix R in (1) satisfies the JL lemma, x
can be reconstructed with minimum error from v with high
probability if x is K-sparse (e.g., audio or image signals).
This strong theoretical support motivates us to analyze the
high-dimensional signals via their low-dimensional random
projections. In the proposed algorithm, a very sparse matrix is
adopted that not only asymptotically satisfies the JL lemma,
but also can be efficiently computed for real-time tracking.
3.2 Very sparse random measurement matrix
A typical measurement matrix satisfying the restricted isome-
try property is the random Gaussian matrix R ∈ R
n×m
where
r
ij
∼ N(0, 1) (i.e., zero mean and unit variance), as used in
recent work [11], [37], [38]. However, as the matrix is dense,
the memory and computational loads are very expensive when
m is large. In this paper, we adopt a very sparse random
measurement matrix with entries defined as
r
ij
=
√
ρ ×
1 with probability
1
2ρ
0 with probability 1 −
1
ρ
−1 with probability
1
2ρ
.
(7)
Achlioptas [20] proves that this type of matrix with ρ = 1
or 3 satisfies the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma (i.e., (4) and
(5)). This matrix is easy to compute which requires only a
uniform random generator. More importantly, when ρ = 3,
it is sparse where two thirds of the computation can be
avoided. In addition, Li et al. [39] show that for ρ = o(m)
(x ∈ R
m
), the random projections are almost as accurate as
the conventional random projections where r
ij
∼ N(0, 1).
Therefore, the random matrix (7) with ρ = o(m) asymp-
totically satisfies the JL lemma. In this work, we set ρ =
o(m) = m/(a log
10
(m)) = m/(10a) ∼ m/(6a) with a
fixed constant a because the dimensionality m is typically
in the order of 10
6
to 10
10
. For each row of R, only about
c = (
1
2ρ
+
1
2ρ
) × m = a log
10
(m) ≤ 10a nonzero entries
need to be computed. We observe that good results can be
obtained by fixing a = 0.4 in our experiments. Therefore, the
computational complexity is only o(cn) (n = 100 in this work)
which is very low. Furthermore, only the nonzero entries of R
need to be stored which makes the memory requirement also
very light.