In order to solve the influence of scale change on target tracking using the drone, a multi-scale target tracking algorithm is proposed which based on the color feature tracking algorithm. The algorithm realized adaptive scale tracking by training position and scale correlation filters. It can first obtain the target center position of next frame by computing the maximum of the response, where the position correlation filter is learned by the least squares classifier and the dimensionality reduction for color features is analyzed by principal component analysis. The scale correlation filter is obtained by color characteristics at 33 rectangular areas which is set by the scale factor around the central location and is reduced dimensions by orthogonal triangle decomposition. Finally, the location and size of the target are updated by the maximum of the response. By testing 13 challenging video sequences taken by the drone, the results show that the algorithm has adaptability to the changes in the target scale and its robustness along with many other performance indicators are both better than the most state-of-the-art methods in illumination Variation, fast motion, motion blur and other complex situations.

Correlation filter-based approaches achieve competitive results in visual tracking, but the traditional correlation tracking methods failed in mining the color information of the videos. To address this issue, we propose a novel tracker combined with color features in a correlation filter framework, which extracts not only gray but also color information as the feature maps to compute the maximum response location via multi-channel correlation filters. In particular, we modify the label function of the conventional classifier to improve positioning accuracy and employ a discriminative correlation filter to handle scale variations. Experiments are performed on 35 challenging benchmark color sequences. And the results clearly show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art tracking approaches while operating in real-time.

In camera-based object recognition and classification, surface color is one of the most important characteristics. However, apparent object color may differ significantly according to the illumination and surface conditions. Such a variation can be an obstacle in utilizing color features. Geusebroek et al.'s color invariants can be a powerful tool for characterizing the object color regardless of illumination and surface conditions. In this work, we analyze the estimation process of the color invariants from RGB images, and propose a novel invariant feature of color based on the elementary invariants to meet the circular continuity residing in the mapping between colors and their invariants. Experiments show that the use of the proposed invariant in combination with luminance, contributes to improve the retrieval performances of partial object image matching under varying illumination conditions.