Meta-Tracker: Fast and Robust Online Adaptation for Visual Object Trackers

This paper improves state-of-the-art visual object trackers that use online adaptation. Our core contribution is an offline meta-learning-based method to adjust the initial deep networks used in online adaptation-based tracking. The meta learning is driven by the goal of deep networks that can quickly be adapted to robustly model a particular target in future frames. Ideally the resulting models focus on features that are useful for future frames, and avoid overfitting to background clutter, small parts of the target, or noise. By enforcing a small number of update iterations during meta-learning, the resulting networks train significantly faster. We demonstrate this approach on top of the high performance tracking approaches: tracking-by-detection based MDNet and the correlation based CREST. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, OTB2015 and VOT2016, show that our meta-learned versions of both trackers improve speed, accuracy, and robustness.Comment: Code: https://github.com/silverbottlep/meta_tracker

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 Background-Aware Correlation Filters for Visual Tracking

Correlation Filters (CFs) have recently demonstrated excellent performance in terms of rapidly tracking objects under challenging photometric and geometric variations. The strength of the approach comes from its ability to efficiently learn - "on the fly" - how the object is changing over time. A fundamental drawback to CFs, however, is that the background of the object is not be modelled over time which can result in suboptimal results. In this paper we propose a Background-Aware CF that can model how both the foreground and background of the object varies over time. Our approach, like conventional CFs, is extremely computationally efficient - and extensive experiments over multiple tracking benchmarks demonstrate the superior accuracy and real-time performance of our method compared to the state-of-the-art trackers including those based on a deep learning paradigm

Good Features to Correlate for Visual Tracking

During the recent years, correlation filters have shown dominant and spectacular results for visual object tracking. The types of the features that are employed in these family of trackers significantly affect the performance of visual tracking. The ultimate goal is to utilize robust features invariant to any kind of appearance change of the object, while predicting the object location as properly as in the case of no appearance change. As the deep learning based methods have emerged, the study of learning features for specific tasks has accelerated. For instance, discriminative visual tracking methods based on deep architectures have been studied with promising performance. Nevertheless, correlation filter based (CFB) trackers confine themselves to use the pre-trained networks which are trained for object classification problem. To this end, in this manuscript the problem of learning deep fully convolutional features for the CFB visual tracking is formulated. In order to learn the proposed model, a novel and efficient backpropagation algorithm is presented based on the loss function of the network. The proposed learning framework enables the network model to be flexible for a custom design. Moreover, it alleviates the dependency on the network trained for classification. Extensive performance analysis shows the efficacy of the proposed custom design in the CFB tracking framework. By fine-tuning the convolutional parts of a state-of-the-art network and integrating this model to a CFB tracker, which is the top performing one of VOT2016, 18% increase is achieved in terms of expected average overlap, and tracking failures are decreased by 25%, while maintaining the superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 tracking datasets.Comment: Accepted version of IEEE Transactions on Image Processin

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

Deep Motion Features for Visual Tracking

Robust visual tracking is a challenging computer vision problem, with many real-world applications. Most existing approaches employ hand-crafted appearance features, such as HOG or Color Names. Recently, deep RGB features extracted from convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied for tracking. Despite their success, these features only capture appearance information. On the other hand, motion cues provide discriminative and complementary information that can improve tracking performance. Contrary to visual tracking, deep motion features have been successfully applied for action recognition and video classification tasks. Typically, the motion features are learned by training a CNN on optical flow images extracted from large amounts of labeled videos. This paper presents an investigation of the impact of deep motion features in a tracking-by-detection framework. We further show that hand-crafted, deep RGB, and deep motion features contain complementary information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose fusing appearance information with deep motion features for visual tracking. Comprehensive experiments clearly suggest that our fusion approach with deep motion features outperforms standard methods relying on appearance information alone.Comment: ICPR 2016. Best paper award in the "Computer Vision and Robot Vision" trac