Robust Part-Based Correlation Tracking

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.

Accurate location estimation of a target is a classical and very popular problem in visual object tracking, for which correlation filters have been proven highly effective in real-time scenarios. However, the great variation of the target's appearance and the surrounding background throughout a video sequence would lead to failure tracking for the sake of the model drift, using trackers based on correlation filters. In our approach, we present a simple and fast method to improve the robustness of the model based on sum of template and pixel-wise learners (Staple). On the one hand, a confidence regression model is established to adjust adaptively the model online learning rate to alleviate the model drift. On the other hand, instead of likelihood, the scale with maximal posterior probability is selected as the target scale to obtain the more accurate estimation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against several state-of-the-art algorithms on large-scale challenging benchmark data sets at speed in excess of 42 frames/s.

Intelligent Trigonometric Particle Filter for visual tracking

A multi-view model for visual tracking via correlation filters

In recent years, visual object tracking has become a very active research field which is mainly divided into the correlation filter-based tracking and deep learning (e.g., deep convolutional neural network and Siamese neural network) based tracking. For target tracking algorithms based on deep learning, a large amount of computation is required, usually deployed on expensive graphics cards. However, for the rich monitoring devices in the Internet of Things, it is difficult to capture all the moving targets in each device in real time, so it is necessary to perform hierarchical processing and use tracking based on correlation filtering in insensitive areas to alleviate the local computing pressure. In sensitive areas, upload the video stream to a cloud computing platform with a faster computing speed to perform an algorithm based on deep features. In this paper, we mainly focus on the correlation filter-based tracking. In the correlation filter-based tracking, the discriminative scale space tracker (DSST) is one of the most popular and typical ones which is successfully applied to many application fields. However, there are still some improvements that need to be further studied for DSST. One is that the algorithms do not consider the target rotation on purpose. The other is that it is a very heavy computational load to extract the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features from too many patches centered at the target position in order to ensure the scale estimation accuracy. To address these two problems, we introduce the alterable patch number for target scale tracking and the space searching for target rotation tracking into the standard DSST tracking method and propose a visual object multimodality tracker based on correlation filters (MTCF) to simultaneously cope with translation, scale, and rotation in plane for the tracked target and to obtain the target information of position, scale, and attitude angle at the same time. Finally, in Visual Tracker Benchmark data set, the experiments are performed on the proposed algorithms to show their effectiveness in multimodality tracking.

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.

Ant lion optimiser (ALO) is a new nature‐inspired swarm intelligence optimisation algorithm that mimics the hunting mechanism of antlions in nature. ALO has been proved to have the merits of high exploitation and convergence speed benefiting from adaptive boundary shrinking mechanism and elitism. In this work, visual tracking is expressed as searching for object in whole search space by interaction between antlions and ants. A novel ALO‐based visual tracking framework is proposed and the adaptation and sensitivity of the parameters in ALO are discussed to improve tracking performance. In addition, considering that ALO tracker needs a lot of iteration consumption, kernel correlation filter with deep feature is integrated into the ALO tracking framework (ALOKCF) to improve track efficiency. Extensive experimental results prove that the ALO tracker is very competitive compared to other trackers, especially for abrupt motion tracking. At the same time, two visual tracking benchmarks are used to verify ALOKCF tracker achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance.

Visual object tracking via enhanced structural correlation filter

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

Visual tracking has attracted a significant attention in the last few decades. The recent surge in the number of publications on tracking-related problems have made it almost impossible to follow the developments in the field. One of the reasons is that there is a lack of commonly accepted annotated data-sets and standardized evaluation protocols that would allow objective comparison of different tracking methods. To address this issue, the Visual Object Tracking (VOT) workshop was organized in conjunction with ICCV2013. Researchers from academia as well as industry were invited to participate in the first VOT2013 challenge which aimed at single-object visual trackers that do not apply pre-learned models of object appearance (model-free). Presented here is the VOT2013 benchmark dataset for evaluation of single-object visual trackers as well as the results obtained by the trackers competing in the challenge. In contrast to related attempts in tracker benchmarking, the dataset is labeled per-frame by visual attributes that indicate occlusion, illumination change, motion change, size change and camera motion, offering a more systematic comparison of the trackers. Furthermore, we have designed an automated system for performing and evaluating the experiments. We present the evaluation protocol of the VOT2013 challenge and the results of a comparison of 27 trackers on the benchmark dataset. The dataset, the evaluation tools and the tracker rankings are publicly available from the challenge website (http://votchallenge.net).

CFGVF: An improved correlation filters based visual tracking algorithm

Visual object tracking is a critical problem in the field of computer vision. The visual object tracker methods can be divided into Correlation Filters (CF) and non-correlation filters trackers. The main advantage of CF-based trackers is that they have an accepted real-time tracking response. In this article, we will focus on CF-based trackers, due to their key role in online applications such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), through two contributions. In the first contribution, we proposed a set of new video sequences to address two uncovered issues of the existing standard datasets. The first issue is to create two video sequence that is difficult to be tracked by a human being for the movement of the Amoeba under the microscope; these two proposed video sequences include a new feature that combined background clutter and occlusion features in a unique way; we called it hard-to-follow-by-human. The second issue is to increase the difficulty of the existing sequences by increasing the displacement of the tracked object. Then, we proposed a thorough, practical evaluation of eight CF-base trackers, with the top performance, on the existing sequence features such as out-of-view, background clutters, and fast motion. The evaluation utilized the well-known OTB-2013 dataset as well as the proposed video sequences. The overall assessment of the eight trackers on the standard evaluation metrics, e.g., precision and success rates, revealed that the Large Displacement Estimation of Similarity transformation (LDES) tracker is the best CF-based tracker among the trackers of comparison. On the contrary, with a deeper analysis, the results of the proposed video sequences show an average performance of the LDES tracker among the other trackers. The eight trackers failed to capture the moving objects in every frame of the proposed Amoeba movement video sequences while the same trackers managed to capture the object in almost every frame of the sequences of the standard dataset. These results outline the need to improve the CF-based object trackers to be able to process sequences with the proposed feature (i.e., hard-to-follow-by-human).

Deep auto-encoder (DAE) models have been successfully used in object tracking due to its strong capability of feature representation. However, single deep auto-encoder model would not be robust enough to represent the appearance model of outdoor vehicle for its harsh working environment, such as illumination variation, occlusion, cluttered background and so on. In this paper, a novel multiple-DAE-based tracking approach, that is, classifier adaptive fusion for robust outdoor vehicle visual tracking approach is proposed under particle filter framework. Firstly, two deep auto-encoders are offline trained by gray-scale image and gradient image of the raw training images, respectively to obtain the stronger feature representation of gray-scale image and gradient image. Secondly, two classifiers are constructed using the encoder of the two well-trained deep auto-encoders and the output of the each classifier is used to compute the confidence of the corresponding particles. Finally, the confidence output of the two classifiers is fused and applied in online tracking, where, the fusion weight of the each classifier is computed according to the distribution of particles represented by different classifier. Extensive tracking experiments conducted on visual tracking benchmark (VTB) show that the proposed tracking algorithm outperforms 9 popular tracking algorithms in the challenge scenes of outdoor vehicle tracking such as illumination variation, occlusion, cluttered background and scale variation.

There are mainly two components in almost every visual object tracking algorithm, which are the object presentation and the searching mechanism. In the literature, metaheuristic algorithms have been recently, widely used as searching method in visual tracking. In fact, the more discriminative is their combined object presentation the better is their precision. Salient background information is often inside the first detected region of the object, which may decrease considerably the tracking performance. In this work, we combine a powerful metaheuristic searching method, whale optimization algorithm (WOA), with the discriminative presentation named as corrected background weighted histogram (CBWH) to improve the tracking accuracy in difficult environments. WOA algorithm is used because of its strong searching ability, which enable it avoid being trapped in local optimum, and also its lowest computation cost compared to other metaheuristic algorithms. The WOA sensitivity parameters are studied experimentally to be adjusted in visual tracking. For a fair assessment of the proposed approach, its performance has been evaluated on 20 video sequences, from the famous object tracking benchmark OTB15, and compared with six (6) other state-of-art trackers. The evaluations were carried quantitatively and qualitatively on challenging situations and have provided satisfying results. The experimental results shows that WOA combined with CBWH can lead to further improvement, and better success rate in tracking.

This study addresses the challenges of selecting a suitable visual tracking method for real-time mobile robot applications, particularly in scenarios where the target is moving on the ground. The primary research problem addressed is the need for a flexible, computationally efficient tracking method that does not rely on pre-existing labelled datasets, as is often required by deep learning approaches. Unsupervised methods can overcome this problem by utilizing object motion information in each image frame without prior training. With many unsupervised tracking methods available, choosing an appropriate algorithm that can perform efficiently under dynamic conditions becomes a critical problem. The study compares the performance of three unsupervised visual tracking methods: particle filter, optical flow, and channel and spatial reliability tracker (CSRT) under various tracking conditions. The dataset used includes challenges such as moving target variations, changes in object scale, viewpoint changes, suboptimal lighting, image blurring, partial occlusions, and abrupt movements. Evaluation criteria include tracking accuracy, resistance to occlusion, and computational efficiency. The particle filter with ORB and a constant velocity model achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 36.47 pixels at 13 frames per second (fps). Optical flow performs best with an RMSE of 10.79 pixels at 30 fps, while CSRT shows an RMSE of 252.35 pixels at 4 fps. These findings highlight the effectiveness of optical flow for real-time applications, making it a promising solution for mobile robot visual tracking in challenging situations.