AB-chromaticity histogram analysis works well most of the time, but it may not work well when the color cast is not severe. To overcome this problem, we propose an improved, two-step automatic cast-detection method. First, we compute the RGB color variance to evaluate the quality of the input image. If this variance is very small, we extract near-neutral color areas and compute the local ab-chromaticity histogram. We use this local ab-chromaticity histogram to evaluate the quality of the input image. This method has been tested in ZTE’s video surveillance system. The results show that the proposed method produces better results based on subjective evaluation and is more efficient in various conditions.

To tackle the problem of severe occlusions in visual tracking, we propose a hierarchical template-matching method based on a layered appearance model. This model integrates holistic- and part-region matching in order to locate an object in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore, in order to reduce ambiguity in object localization, only the discriminative parts of an object’s appearance template are chosen for similarity computing with respect to their cornerness measurements. The similarity between parts is computed in a layer-wise manner, and from this, occlusions can be evaluated. When the object is partly occluded, it can be located accurately by matching candidate regions with the appearance template. When it is completely occluded, its location can be predicted from its historical motion information using a Kalman filter. The proposed tracker is tested on several practical image sequences, and the experimental results show that it can consistently provide accurate object location for stable tracking, even for severe occlusions.