End-to-end Flow Correlation Tracking with Spatial-temporal Attention

Discriminative correlation filters (DCF) with deep convolutional features have achieved favorable performance in recent tracking benchmarks. However, most of existing DCF trackers only consider appearance features of current frame, and hardly benefit from motion and inter-frame information. The lack of temporal information degrades the tracking performance during challenges such as partial occlusion and deformation. In this work, we focus on making use of the rich flow information in consecutive frames to improve the feature representation and the tracking accuracy. Firstly, individual components, including optical flow estimation, feature extraction, aggregation and correlation filter tracking are formulated as special layers in network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly train flow and tracking task in a deep learning framework. Then the historical feature maps at predefined intervals are warped and aggregated with current ones by the guiding of flow. For adaptive aggregation, we propose a novel spatial-temporal attention mechanism. Extensive experiments are performed on four challenging tracking datasets: OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2015 and VOT2016, and the proposed method achieves superior results on these benchmarks.Comment: Accepted in CVPR 201

Discriminative Image Warping with Attribute Flow

We address the problem of finding deformation between two images for the purpose of recognizing objects. The challenge is that discriminative features are often transformation-variant (e.g. histogram of oriented gradients, texture), while transformation-invariant features (e.g. intensity, color) are often not discriminative. We introduce the concept of attribute flow which explicitly models how image attributes vary with its deformation. We develop a non-parametric method to approximate this using histogram matching, which can be solved efficiently using linear programming. Our method produces dense correspondence between images, and utilizes discriminative, transformation-variant features for simultaneous detection and alignment. Experiments on ETHZ shape categories dataset show that we can accurately recognize highly deformable objects with few training examples. 1