The condensation tracking algorithm uses a prior transition probability as the proposal distribution, which does not make full use of the current observation. In order to overcome this shortcoming, a new face tracking algorithm based on particle filter with mean shift importance sampling is proposed. First, the coarse location of the face target is attained by the efficient mean shift tracker, and then the result is used to construct the proposal distribution for particle propagation. Because the particles obtained with this method can cluster around the true state region, particle efficiency is improved greatly. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than that of the standard condensation tracking algorithm.
