Context-aware long-term correlation tracking with hierarchical convolutional features

Object tracking is a challenging task in computer vision. The correlation filter based trackers are widely used for visual tracking due to their efficiencies. However, they cannot handle occlusion very well. In this paper, an effective method is proposed for occlusion detection based on high-level classification scores from the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on the ImageNet dataset. Also, we propose a novel tracking method by holistically considering multiple tracking models trained previously. In each frame, multiple correlation filters are first trained using hierarchical convolutional features, and then progressively selected according to the so-called tracking quality (status). Finally, a linear motion model is adopted to effectively re-detect the lost target. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method achieved good performance for handling occlusion.

Visual object tracking is a significant technology for camera-based sensor networks applications. Multilayer convolutional features comprehensively used in correlation filter (CF)-based tracking algorithms have achieved excellent performance. However, there are tracking failures in some challenging situations because ordinary features are not able to well represent the object appearance variations and the correlation filters are updated irrationally. In this paper, we propose a local–global multiple correlation filters (LGCF) tracking algorithm for edge computing systems capturing moving targets, such as vehicles and pedestrians. First, we construct a global correlation filter model with deep convolutional features, and choose horizontal or vertical division according to the aspect ratio to build two local filters with hand-crafted features. Then, we propose a local–global collaborative strategy to exchange information between local and global correlation filters. This strategy can avoid the wrong learning of the object appearance model. Finally, we propose a time-space peak to sidelobe ratio (TSPSR) to evaluate the stability of the current CF. When the estimated results of the current CF are not reliable, the Kalman filter redetection (KFR) model would be enabled to recapture the object. The experimental results show that our presented algorithm achieves better performances on OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 compared with the other latest 12 tracking algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm handles various challenges in object tracking well.

One of the most important and challenging research topics in the area of computer vision is visual object tracking, which is relevant to many real-world applications. Recently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF) have been demonstrated to overcome the problems in visual object tracking efficiently. So far, only single-resolution feature maps have been utilized in DCF. Owing to this limitation, the potential of DCF has not been exploited. Moreover, convolutional features have demonstrated a better performance for visual tracking than histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) features and color features. Based on these facts, in this paper, we propose collaborative learning based on multi-resolution feature maps for DCF, employing convolutional features. Further, the confidence score, which represents the location of the target object, is selected from various candidates based on certain rules. In addition, the continuous filters are trained to handle the variations of appearance of the target. The extensive experimental results obtained using VOT2015 and OTB-100 benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art tracking algorithms.

Visual tracking is of great significance in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a long-term tracking method to deal with appearance variation caused by occlusion, fast motion, out-of-view, etc. Firstly, we extract CNNs features from both low and high depth of a pre-trained VGGNet and estimate target translation via correlation filters separately trained on features from three different layers. Then a HOG based scale correlation filter is applied to search target pyramids cropped around target position for optimal scale. In case of tracking failure, we train a SVM to re-detect the target. In addition, scale model is only updated when scale response is higher than a pre-defined threshold. Experimental results on OTB2013 show that our algorithm is of effectiveness and robustness in case of heavy appearance changes.

CFGVF: An improved correlation filters based visual tracking algorithm

Recently, Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) have shown excellent performance in visual object tracking. The correlation for a computing response map can be conducted efficiently in Fourier domain by Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of inputs, where the DFT of an image has symmetry on the Fourier domain. To enhance the robustness and discriminative ability of the filters, many efforts have been devoted to optimizing the learning process. Regularization methods, such as spatial regularization or temporal regularization, used in existing DCF trackers aim to enhance the capacity of the filters. Most existing methods still fail to deal with severe appearance variations—in particular, the large scale and aspect ratio changes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that employs adaptive spatial regularization and temporal regularization to learn reliable filters in both spatial and temporal domains for tracking. To alleviate the influence of the background and distractors to the non-rigid target objects, two sub-models are combined, and multiple features are utilized for learning of robust correlation filters. In addition, most DCF trackers that applied 1-dimensional scale space search method suffered from appearance changes, such as non-rigid deformation. We proposed a 2-dimensional scale space search method to find appropriate scales to adapt to large scale and aspect ratio changes. We perform comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks: OTB-100, VOT-2016, VOT-2018, and LaSOT. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our tracker, which achieved a competitive tracking performance. On OTB-100, our tracker achieved a gain of 0.8% in success, compared to the best existing DCF trackers. On VOT2018, our tracker outperformed the top DCF trackers with a gain of 1.1% in Expected Average Overlap (EAO). On LaSOT, we obtained a gain of 5.2% in success, compared to the best DCF trackers.

This paper presents a correlation filter object tracker based on fast spatial-spectral features (FSSF) to realize robust, real-time object tracking in hyperspectral surveillance video. Traditional object tracking in surveillance video based only on appearance information often fails in the presence of background clutter, low resolution, and appearance changes. Hyperspectral imaging uses unique spectral properties as well as spatial information to improve tracking accuracy in such challenging environments. However, the high-dimensionality of hyperspectral images causes high computational costs and difficulties for discriminative feature extraction. In FSSF, the real-time spatial-spectral convolution (RSSC) kernel is updated in real time in the Fourier transform domain without offline training to quickly extract discriminative spatial-spectral features. The spatial-spectral features are integrated into correlation filters to complete the hyperspectral tracking. To validate the proposed scheme, we collected a hyperspectral surveillance video (HSSV) dataset consisting of 70 sequences in 25 bands. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages and the efficiency of the proposed FSSF for object tracking in hyperspectral video tracking in challenging conditions of background clutter, low resolution, and appearance changes.

Correlation filter (CF) based trackers have gained significant attention in the field of visual single-object tracking, owing to their favorable performance and high efficiency; however, existing trackers still suffer from model drift caused by boundary effects and filter degradation. In visual tracking, long-term occlusion and large appearance variations easily cause model degradation. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose a sparse adaptive spatial-temporal context-aware method that effectively avoids model drift. Specifically, a global context is explicitly incorporated into the correlation filter to mitigate boundary effects. Subsequently, an adaptive temporal regularization constraint is adopted in the filter training stage to avoid model degradation. Meanwhile, a sparse response constraint is introduced to reduce the risk of further model drift. Furthermore, we apply the alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) to derive a closed-solution of the object function with a low computational cost. In addition, an updating scheme based on the APCE-pool and Peak-pool is proposed to reveal the tracking condition and ensure updates of the target’s appearance model with high-confidence. The Kalam filter is adopted to track the target when the appearance model is persistently unreliable and abnormality occurs. Finally, extensive experimental results on OTB-2013, OTB-2015 and VOT2018 datasets show that our proposed tracker performs favorably against several state-of-the-art trackers.

Object tracking in satellite videos faces various challenges such as target occlusion, target rotation, and background clutter. This study proposes a correlation particle filter algorithm with motion estimation for object tracking in satellite videos. The tracker, called CPKF, combines the strengths of the correlation, particle, and Kalman filters. Compared with existing tracking methods based on correlation filters, the proposed tracker has three major advantages: (1) Particle sampling, and motion estimation build robustness against partial and complete occlusion. (2) Color histogram model makes it robust to target rotation. (3) Fusion of multiple feature response maps effectively handle background clutter and low contrast. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm performs better than state-of-the-art methods.

Visual tracking is an important area in computer vision. How to deal with illumination and occlusion problems is a challenging issue. This paper presents a novel and efficient tracking algorithm to handle such problems. On one hand, a target’s initial appearance always has clear contour, which is light-invariant and robust to illumination change. On the other hand, features play an important role in tracking, among which convolutional features have shown favorable performance. Therefore, we adopt convolved contour features to represent the target appearance. Generally speaking, first-order derivative edge gradient operators are efficient in detecting contours by convolving them with images. Especially, the Prewitt operator is more sensitive to horizontal and vertical edges, while the Sobel operator is more sensitive to diagonal edges. Inherently, Prewitt and Sobel are complementary with each other. Technically speaking, this paper designs two groups of Prewitt and Sobel edge detectors to extract a set of complete convolutional features, which include horizontal, vertical and diagonal edges features. In the first frame, contour features are extracted from the target to construct the initial appearance model. After the analysis of experimental image with these contour features, it can be found that the bright parts often provide more useful information to describe target characteristics. Therefore, we propose a method to compare the similarity between candidate sample and our trained model only using bright pixels, which makes our tracker able to deal with partial occlusion problem. After getting the new target, in order to adapt appearance change, we propose a corresponding online strategy to incrementally update our model. Experiments show that convolutional features extracted by well-integrated Prewitt and Sobel edge detectors can be efficient enough to learn robust appearance model. Numerous experimental results on nine challenging sequences show that our proposed approach is very effective and robust in comparison with the state-of-the-art trackers.

Correlation tracker has made a huge success in visual object tracking. However, it is mainly because that the tracker cannot catch the occurrence of appearance changes, tracking based on correlation filters often drifts due to the unexpected appearance changes caused by occlusion, deformation and background clutter. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect the case when the tracker encountered the unexpected appearance changes. This method uses the following points: 1) Filter response curve would decreases dramatically when target suffers heavy appearance changes. 2) Features extracted from deeper layers of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have more semantics information and features extracted from shadower layers have more spatial information. Extensive experimental results on several public benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can deal with the appearance changes effectively.

Appearance change of moving targets is a challenging problem in visual tracking. In this paper, we present a novel visual object tracking algorithm based on the observation dependent hidden Markov model (OD-HMM) framework. The observation dependency is computed by structure complexity coefficients (SCC) which is defined to predict the target appearance change. Unlike conventional methods addressing the appearance change problem by investigating different online appearance models, we handle this problem by addressing the fundamental reason of motion -related appearance change during visual tracking. Based on the analysis of motion-related appearance change, we investigate the relationship between the structure of the object surface and the appearance stability. The appearance of complex structural regions is easier to change compared with that of smooth structural regions with object moving. Based on this, we define SCC to predict the appearance stability of moving objects. Different from the standard HMM-based tracking algorithms where observations between different frames are assumed to be independent, we consider the observation dependency between consecutive frames with the information provided by SCC. Moreover , we present a novel outlier removing method in appearance model updating which helps to avoid error accumulation. Experimental results on challenging video sequences demonstrate that the proposed visual tracking algorithm with OD-HMM and SCC achieves better performance than existing related tracking algorithms.

Visual tracking is a challenging problem due to the intricate appearance variation of the objects in video sequences. Recently, correlation filters(CFs) technique has become a powerful tool for building a robust and high-speed visual tracker. However, there are still some intractable problems need to be solved: 1) The updating strategy of the CF's appearance model is linear, this strategy can not distinguish objects from the occlusions, may adding non-objects to the linear appearance model, 2) The conventional CFs can not handle the affine transforms of the objects. In this paper, we combine the local sparse method and CFs to construct an appearance model of the objects, and use the particle filters to find the objects' affine transforms. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the original local sparse coding approach and other state-of-the-art trackers.

Visual object tracking is a challenging problem due to appearance variation of target. Correlation filter (CF) -based trackers have shown competing results for visual object tracking. However, they perform poorly in the case of abrupt motion and heavy background clutter due to less use of contextual information. In this paper, we solve this problem by explicitly incorporating contextual information into a context-aware (CA) framework. Under this framework, deep features from higher convolutional layers encode more semantic information of target which are robust to appearance variations, and features from lower layers locate the target more precise. Compared with handcrafted features, DL-based representation learning require less human interventions and provide much better performance. Extensive experimental results on largescale benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

Significant progress is made in the field of object tracking recently. Especially, trackers based on deep learning and correlation filters both have achieved excellent performance. However, object tracking still faces some challenging problems such as deformation and illumination. In such kinds of situations, the accuracy and precision of tracking algorithms plunge as a result. It is imminent to find a solution to this situation. In this paper, we propose a tracking algorithm based on features extracted by residual network called Resnet features and cascaded correlation filters to improve precision and accuracy. Firstly, features extracted by a deep residual network trained on other image processing datasets, are robust enough and retain higher resolution, therefore, we exploit Resnet-101 pretrained offline to obtain features extracted by middle and high layers for target appearance model representation. Resnet-101 is deeper compared with other deep neural networks which means it contains more semantic information. Then, the method we propose to combine our correlation filters is superior. We propose cascaded correlation filters generated by handcraft, middle-level and high-level features from residual network to gain better competence. Handcraft features localize target precisely because they contain more spatial details while Resnet features are robust to the target appearance change because they retain more semantic information. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on OTB2013 and OTB2015 benchmark. The experimental results show that our tracker achieves high performance under all kinds of challenges and performs favorably against other state-of-the-art trackers.