Learning dynamic spatial-temporal regularized correlation filter tracking with response deviation suppression via multi-feature fusion

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.

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.

The technology of visual object tracking based on correlation filter has good accuracy and efficiency. However, it is still necessary to be study further on the appearance model of the target, the scale variation of the target and so on. This paper proposes a tracking algorithm based on discriminative correlation filtering and a hybrid color feature. The hybrid color feature is composed of two parts, which are compressed color name features and Histogram of Oriented Gradient features based on opponent color space. These two parts features above are extracted from the target patch, respectively. For the first part, color-name features are extracted from a target patch firstly, and then block-based compressed color-name features are extracted according to these color-name features. For the second part, opponent color features are extracted from the target patch firstly, and then HOG features are extracted from these opponent color features. At the basis of the hybrid color feature, two different discriminative correlation filters are used to estimate the translation and the scale of the target, respectively. Finally, extensive experiments show that the tracking algorithm with the hybrid color features of this paper outperforming several state-of-the-art tracking algorithms.

Adaptive spatial-temporal surrounding-aware correlation filter tracking via ensemble learning

Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCFs) have demonstrated excellent performance in visual object tracking. These methods utilize a periodic assumption of the training samples to efficiently learn a classifier on image patches; unfortunately, this also introduces unwanted boundary effects. Recently, Spatially Regularized Discriminative Correlation Filters (SRDCFs) were proposed to resolve this issue by introducing penalization weights to the filter coefficients, thereby efficiently reducing boundary effects by assigning higher weights to the background. However, due to the variable target scale, defining the penalization ratio is non trivial; thus, it is possible to penalize the image content while also penalizing the background. In this paper, we investigate SRDCFs and present a novel and efficient part-based tracking framework by exploiting multiple SRDCFs. Compared with existing trackers, the proposed method has several advantages. (1) We define multiple correlation filters to extract features within the range of the object, thereby alleviating the boundary effect problem and avoiding penalization of the target content. (2) Through the combination of cyclic object shifts with penalized filters to build part-based object trackers, there is no need to divide training samples into parts. (3) Comprehensive comparisons demonstrate that our approach achieves a performance equivalent to that of the baseline SRDCF tracker on a set of benchmark datasets, namely, OTB2013, OTB2015 and VOT2017. In addition, compared with other state-of-the-art trackers, our approach demonstrates superior performance.

In recent years, discriminative correlation filter (DCF) based algorithms have significantly advanced the state of the art in visual object tracking. The key to the success of DCF is an efficient discriminative regression model trained with powerful multi-cue features, including both hand-crafted and deep neural network features. However, the tracking performance is hindered by their inability to respond adequately to abrupt target appearance variations. This issue is posed by the limited representation capability of fixed image features. In this work, we set out to rectify this shortcoming by proposing a complementary representation of a visual content. Specifically, we propose the use of a collaborative representation between successive frames to extract the dynamic appearance information from a target with rapid appearance changes, which results in suppressing the undesirable impact of the background. The resulting collaborative representation coefficients are combined with the original feature maps using a spatially regularised DCF framework for performance boosting. The experimental results on several benchmarking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, as compared with a number of state-of-the-art tracking algorithms.

Augmenting cascaded correlation filters with spatial–temporal saliency for visual tracking

Recent progress has witnessed continued attention in discriminative correlation filter (DCF) tracking algorithms due to its high-efficiency. However, the existing DCF inevitably introduces some cyclic repetitions in learning and detection, which might lead to the heavy drift problem encountered in significant appearance variants owing to occlusion, deformation and motion blur. In this paper, we propose a dilated-aware discriminative correlation filter framework for visual tracking, which fully exploits multi-scale receptive contextual information of correlation filter to mitigate the impact of unwanted boundary and model degradation. On the premise of nondestructive filtering structure, our method adopts a simple formulation based on Kronecker product over discriminative correlation filter. By hands of multiple dilated factors perceive the multi-level spatial receptive map on objects. The framework learns a reliable response map by the residual understanding of multiple factor-dilated correlations filters. Furthermore, experiment results in a recent comprehensive tracking benchmark demonstrate a promising performance of the proposed method subjectively and objectively compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms.

An accelerated correlation filter tracker

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based tracking is attracting increasing attention and developing rapidly in applications such as agriculture, aviation, navigation, transportation and public security. Recently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF)-based trackers have stood out in UAV tracking community for their high efficiency and appealing robustness on a single CPU. However, due to limited onboard computation resources and other challenges the efficiency and accuracy of existing DCF-based approaches is still not satisfying. In this paper, inspired by residue representation, we exploit the residue nature inherent to videos and propose residue-aware correlation filters that show better convergence properties in filter learning. Moreover, we explore using segmentation by the GrabCut to improve the wildly adopted discriminative scale estimation in DCF-based trackers, which, as a mater of fact, greatly impacts the precision and accuracy of the trackers since accumulated scale error degrades the appearance model as online updating goes on. Extensive experiments are conducted on four UAV benchmarks, namely, UAV123@10fps, DTB70, UAVDT and Vistrone2018 (VisDrone2018-test-dev). The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

As a significant research direction in remote sensing fields, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) tracking has achieved rapid development in recent years. However, due to limited power and computation resources on aerial platforms, the tracking methods deployed on UAVs usually require high computational efficiency and performance. In addition, various challenges (i.e., similar object, background clutter and occlusion) have inevitably occurred during the UAV tracking phase. Therefore, considering the above issues comprehensively, this paper proposes a dynamic aberrance-repressed temporal regularized correlation filter to achieve stable tracking in UAV remote sensing videos. First, we have introduced the aberrance-repressed temporal regularizations into the discriminative correlation filter (DCF) framework. Second, a novel objective loss function is constructed to adjust the strength of each regularization for training the filter. Then, a new judgment mechanism based on the response variation is exploited to reflect the response fluctuation and applied to tune parameters of both regularizations. Finally, comprehensive experiments are done on three different UAV benchmarks, i.e., UAV123@10fps, UAVDT and VisDrone2018, to verify the performance of our tracker and have demonstrated that our tracker achieves superior performance against other total 25 state-of-the-art trackers while reaching <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 35 FPS on a single CPU.

In recent years, deep convolutional features have been deployed in discriminative correlation filters (DCF) to boost object tracking performance. However, features captured from pre-trained classification networks are usually trained for image classification tasks, not object tracking. In this paper, we find that different convolutional feature channels play different roles in tracking different targets. Some feature channels are favorable for tracking a given target and can be acquired based on this target, some are irrelevant to track this target, and some can be the primary cause of trackers' performance degradation when tracking this target. Thus, we perform feature selection before learning correlation filters for object tracking, and the feature selection module is realized by reinforcement learning. We penalize the features non-positive to obtain a DCF tracker based on positive convolutional feature channels. Compared with DCF based trackers without a feature selection technique, our scheme improves the robustness of target representation, lessens the dimension of activations, and achieves better tracking performance. Extensive experiments on the OTB dataset demonstrate our feature selection scheme is simple, robust, and effective for DCF based trackers.

Discriminative correlation filters (DCF)-based trackers have been increasingly applied to visual tracking due to their high precision while running at high frame rates. However, most recent DCF-based methods solely concentrate on learning the correlation filter with spatial information and thus do not have sufficient descriptive power to discriminate the target from the background in the complex circumstances, such as full occlusion (OCC) and rapid target variation. In this article, we introduce a novel tracking framework that exploits the relationship between the target and its spatiotemporal context to improve tracking accuracy and robustness. Especially, we present our spatiotemporal context model in a hierarchical way, where each layer of the context pyramid is a spatial correlation filter learned from different temporal instances. For gaining an accurate spatiotemporal model, we propose an optimization fusion approach that can adaptively and efficiently learn the effect of each hierarchical layer and exploit these multiple temporal levels of correlation filters for visual tracking. Moreover, an adaptive model update strategy for correlation filters is introduced into the framework to dynamically select proper hierarchical layers, which boosts the temporal diversity of the target appearance, while radically reduces the number of model parameters and guarantees the real-time performance of the tracking method. The experimental results show that, with conventional handcrafted features, our tracker achieves the best success rates among available state-of-the-art trackers with handcrafted features, and provides state-of-the-art performance comparable to those of deep-learning-based trackers on OTB-2013, OTB-2015, VOT-2016, and UAV-20L benchmarks but runs significantly faster than deep trackers.

Recently, visual object tracking has become a hot topic in computer vision community owing to its extensive applications and fundamental research significance. Many researchers have paid attention to the discriminative correlation filter (DCF) due to its excellent tracking performance. The background-aware CF (BACF) is developed to handle the inevitable boundary effects of DCFs that shows superior performance compared with other CF-based trackers. However, BACF has a poor occlusion handling ability. To overcome this defect, we propose a saliency-aware CF tracking (SACF) model. In SACF, a saliency map of the target is introduced on CFs to strengthen the ability to extract the target from a complex background. Meanwhile, to adjust to the rapid variation of the target appearance, we adaptively modify the learning rate of the filter template using adaptive learning rate. By incorporating the saliency map into the BACF objective function and adaptive learning rate adjustment, the robustness and accuracy of the tracker are boosted significantly. Extensive experiments validate that our method can efficaciously solve the occlusion problem and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed on standard benchmarks, i.e. OTB-2013, OTB-2015 and LaSOT. Compared with other state-of-the-art CF tracking methods, the proposed method is competitive considering accuracy and success rate.

Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) based methods have shown competitive performance on tracking benchmarks in recent years. Generally, DCF based trackers learn a rigid appearance model of the target. However, this reliance on a single rigid appearance model is insufficient in situations where the target undergoes non-rigid transformations. In this paper, we propose a unified formulation for learning a deformable convolution filter. In our framework, the deformable filter is represented as a linear combination of sub-filters. Both the sub-filter coefficients and their relative locations are inferred jointly in our formulation. Experiments are performed on three challenging tracking benchmarks: OTB-2015, TempleColor and VOT2016. Our approach improves the baseline method, leading to performance comparable to state-of-the-art.