Aimed to the poor discrimination of the traditional histogram feature

a Hierarchical Structure Histogram (HSH) is proposed in this paper.Firstly

it transforms the target image into hierarchical sub images according to the intensity value.Then

it calculates the histograms based on the structure image element for each hierarchical sub image according to the predefined structure image element.Finally

it integrates the histograms to obtain the final hierarchical structure feature.Take image matching and visual tracking as two representative examples

a lot of experiments were carried out based on the proposed feature.The experimental results indicate that the proposed feature owns better discriminative performance and local description performance than the referenced features.The similarity map obtained from the HSH-based image matching has a much more discriminative single-humped characteristic.The HSH feature can also dramatically decrease the tracking errors for visual tracking.