Joint Group Feature Selection and Discriminative Filter Learning for Robust Visual Object Tracking

We propose a new Group Feature Selection method for Discriminative Correlation Filters (GFS-DCF) based visual object tracking. The key innovation of the proposed method is to perform group feature selection across both channel and spatial dimensions, thus to pinpoint the structural relevance of multi-channel features to the filtering system. In contrast to the widely used spatial regularisation or feature selection methods, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that channel selection has been advocated for DCF-based tracking. We demonstrate that our GFS-DCF method is able to significantly improve the performance of a DCF tracker equipped with deep neural network features. In addition, our GFS-DCF enables joint feature selection and filter learning, achieving enhanced discrimination and interpretability of the learned filters. To further improve the performance, we adaptively integrate historical information by constraining filters to be smooth across temporal frames, using an efficient low-rank approximation. By design, specific temporal-spatial-channel configurations are dynamically learned in the tracking process, highlighting the relevant features, and alleviating the performance degrading impact of less discriminative representations and reducing information redundancy. The experimental results obtained on OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2017, VOT2018 and TrackingNet demonstrate the merits of our GFS-DCF and its superiority over the state-of-the-art trackers. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/XU-TIANYANG/GFS-DCF

Learning Adaptive Discriminative Correlation Filters via Temporal Consistency Preserving Spatial Feature Selection for Robust Visual Tracking

With efficient appearance learning models, Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) has been proven to be very successful in recent video object tracking benchmarks and competitions. However, the existing DCF paradigm suffers from two major issues, i.e., spatial boundary effect and temporal filter degradation. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a new DCF-based tracking method. The key innovations of the proposed method include adaptive spatial feature selection and temporal consistent constraints, with which the new tracker enables joint spatial-temporal filter learning in a lower dimensional discriminative manifold. More specifically, we apply structured spatial sparsity constraints to multi-channel filers. Consequently, the process of learning spatial filters can be approximated by the lasso regularisation. To encourage temporal consistency, the filter model is restricted to lie around its historical value and updated locally to preserve the global structure in the manifold. Last, a unified optimisation framework is proposed to jointly select temporal consistency preserving spatial features and learn discriminative filters with the augmented Lagrangian method. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations have been conducted on a number of well-known benchmarking datasets such as OTB2013, OTB50, OTB100, Temple-Colour, UAV123 and VOT2018. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches

Robust Visual Tracking Revisited: From Correlation Filter to Template Matching

In this paper, we propose a novel matching based tracker by investigating the relationship between template matching and the recent popular correlation filter based trackers (CFTs). Compared to the correlation operation in CFTs, a sophisticated similarity metric termed "mutual buddies similarity" (MBS) is proposed to exploit the relationship of multiple reciprocal nearest neighbors for target matching. By doing so, our tracker obtains powerful discriminative ability on distinguishing target and background as demonstrated by both empirical and theoretical analyses. Besides, instead of utilizing single template with the improper updating scheme in CFTs, we design a novel online template updating strategy named "memory filtering" (MF), which aims to select a certain amount of representative and reliable tracking results in history to construct the current stable and expressive template set. This scheme is beneficial for the proposed tracker to comprehensively "understand" the target appearance variations, "recall" some stable results. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on two benchmarks suggest that the proposed tracking method performs favorably against some recently developed CFTs and other competitive trackers.Comment: has been published on IEEE TI

Large Margin Object Tracking with Circulant Feature Maps

Structured output support vector machine (SVM) based tracking algorithms have shown favorable performance recently. Nonetheless, the time-consuming candidate sampling and complex optimization limit their real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel large margin object tracking method which absorbs the strong discriminative ability from structured output SVM and speeds up by the correlation filter algorithm significantly. Secondly, a multimodal target detection technique is proposed to improve the target localization precision and prevent model drift introduced by similar objects or background noise. Thirdly, we exploit the feedback from high-confidence tracking results to avoid the model corruption problem. We implement two versions of the proposed tracker with the representations from both conventional hand-crafted and deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) based features to validate the strong compatibility of the algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs superiorly against several state-of-the-art algorithms on the challenging benchmark sequences while runs at speed in excess of 80 frames per second. The source code and experimental results will be made publicly available