Hierarchical Spatial-aware Siamese Network for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking

Most thermal infrared (TIR) tracking methods are discriminative, treating the tracking problem as a classification task. However, the objective of the classifier (label prediction) is not coupled to the objective of the tracker (location estimation). The classification task focuses on the between-class difference of the arbitrary objects, while the tracking task mainly deals with the within-class difference of the same objects. In this paper, we cast the TIR tracking problem as a similarity verification task, which is coupled well to the objective of the tracking task. We propose a TIR tracker via a Hierarchical Spatial-aware Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), named HSSNet. To obtain both spatial and semantic features of the TIR object, we design a Siamese CNN that coalesces the multiple hierarchical convolutional layers. Then, we propose a spatial-aware network to enhance the discriminative ability of the coalesced hierarchical feature. Subsequently, we train this network end to end on a large visible video detection dataset to learn the similarity between paired objects before we transfer the network into the TIR domain. Next, this pre-trained Siamese network is used to evaluate the similarity between the target template and target candidates. Finally, we locate the candidate that is most similar to the tracked target. Extensive experimental results on the benchmarks VOT-TIR 2015 and VOT-TIR 2016 show that our proposed method achieves favourable performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

An In-Depth Analysis of Visual Tracking with Siamese Neural Networks

This survey presents a deep analysis of the learning and inference capabilities in nine popular trackers. It is neither intended to study the whole literature nor is it an attempt to review all kinds of neural networks proposed for visual tracking. We focus instead on Siamese neural networks which are a promising starting point for studying the challenging problem of tracking. These networks integrate efficiently feature learning and the temporal matching and have so far shown state-of-the-art performance. In particular, the branches of Siamese networks, their layers connecting these branches, specific aspects of training and the embedding of these networks into the tracker are highlighted. Quantitative results from existing papers are compared with the conclusion that the current evaluation methodology shows problems with the reproducibility and the comparability of results. The paper proposes a novel Lisp-like formalism for a better comparison of trackers. This assumes a certain functional design and functional decomposition of trackers. The paper tries to give foundation for tracker design by a formulation of the problem based on the theory of machine learning and by the interpretation of a tracker as a decision function. The work concludes with promising lines of research and suggests future work.Comment: submitted to IEEE TPAM

Siamese Attentional Keypoint Network for High Performance Visual Tracking

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of three main aspects of visual tracking, i.e., the backbone network, the attentional mechanism, and the detection component, and propose a Siamese Attentional Keypoint Network, dubbed SATIN, for efficient tracking and accurate localization. Firstly, a new Siamese lightweight hourglass network is specially designed for visual tracking. It takes advantage of the benefits of the repeated bottom-up and top-down inference to capture more global and local contextual information at multiple scales. Secondly, a novel cross-attentional module is utilized to leverage both channel-wise and spatial intermediate attentional information, which can enhance both discriminative and localization capabilities of feature maps. Thirdly, a keypoints detection approach is invented to trace any target object by detecting the top-left corner point, the centroid point, and the bottom-right corner point of its bounding box. Therefore, our SATIN tracker not only has a strong capability to learn more effective object representations, but also is computational and memory storage efficiency, either during the training or testing stages. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose this approach. Without bells and whistles, experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several recent benchmark datasets, at a speed far exceeding 27 frames per second.Comment: Accepted by Knowledge-Based SYSTEM

End-to-end representation learning for Correlation Filter based tracking

The Correlation Filter is an algorithm that trains a linear template to discriminate between images and their translations. It is well suited to object tracking because its formulation in the Fourier domain provides a fast solution, enabling the detector to be re-trained once per frame. Previous works that use the Correlation Filter, however, have adopted features that were either manually designed or trained for a different task. This work is the first to overcome this limitation by interpreting the Correlation Filter learner, which has a closed-form solution, as a differentiable layer in a deep neural network. This enables learning deep features that are tightly coupled to the Correlation Filter. Experiments illustrate that our method has the important practical benefit of allowing lightweight architectures to achieve state-of-the-art performance at high framerates.Comment: To appear at CVPR 201

Prediction-Tracking-Segmentation

We introduce a prediction driven method for visual tracking and segmentation in videos. Instead of solely relying on matching with appearance cues for tracking, we build a predictive model which guides finding more accurate tracking regions efficiently. With the proposed prediction mechanism, we improve the model robustness against distractions and occlusions during tracking. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods not only on visual tracking tasks (VOT 2016 and VOT 2018) but also on video segmentation datasets (DAVIS 2016 and DAVIS 2017)

SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks

Siamese network based trackers formulate tracking as convolutional feature cross-correlation between target template and searching region. However, Siamese trackers still have accuracy gap compared with state-of-the-art algorithms and they cannot take advantage of feature from deep networks, such as ResNet-50 or deeper. In this work we prove the core reason comes from the lack of strict translation invariance. By comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validations, we break this restriction through a simple yet effective spatial aware sampling strategy and successfully train a ResNet-driven Siamese tracker with significant performance gain. Moreover, we propose a new model architecture to perform depth-wise and layer-wise aggregations, which not only further improves the accuracy but also reduces the model size. We conduct extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker, which obtains currently the best results on four large tracking benchmarks, including OTB2015, VOT2018, UAV123, and LaSOT. Our model will be released to facilitate further studies based on this problem.Comment: 9 page

A Twofold Siamese Network for Real-Time Object Tracking

Observing that Semantic features learned in an image classification task and Appearance features learned in a similarity matching task complement each other, we build a twofold Siamese network, named SA-Siam, for real-time object tracking. SA-Siam is composed of a semantic branch and an appearance branch. Each branch is a similarity-learning Siamese network. An important design choice in SA-Siam is to separately train the two branches to keep the heterogeneity of the two types of features. In addition, we propose a channel attention mechanism for the semantic branch. Channel-wise weights are computed according to the channel activations around the target position. While the inherited architecture from SiamFC \cite{SiamFC} allows our tracker to operate beyond real-time, the twofold design and the attention mechanism significantly improve the tracking performance. The proposed SA-Siam outperforms all other real-time trackers by a large margin on OTB-2013/50/100 benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by CVPR'1

Visual Object Tracking based on Adaptive Siamese and Motion Estimation Network

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has attracted much attention in different areas of computer vision, due to its powerful abstract feature representation. Visual object tracking is one of the interesting and important areas in computer vision that achieves remarkable improvements in recent years. In this work, we aim to improve both the motion and observation models in visual object tracking by leveraging representation power of CNNs. To this end, a motion estimation network (named MEN) is utilized to seek the most likely locations of the target and prepare a further clue in addition to the previous target position. Hence the motion estimation would be enhanced by generating a small number of candidates near two plausible positions. The generated candidates are then fed into a trained Siamese network to detect the most probable candidate. Each candidate is compared to an adaptable buffer, which is updated under a predefined condition. To take into account the target appearance changes, a weighting CNN (called WCNN) adaptively assigns weights to the final similarity scores of the Siamese network using sequence-specific information. Evaluation results on well-known benchmark datasets (OTB100, OTB50 and OTB2013) prove that the proposed tracker outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.Comment: 28 pages, 1 algorithm, 7 figures, 2 table, Submitted to Elsevier, Image and Vision Computin

DCFNet: Discriminant Correlation Filters Network for Visual Tracking

Discriminant Correlation Filters (DCF) based methods now become a kind of dominant approach to online object tracking. The features used in these methods, however, are either based on hand-crafted features like HoGs, or convolutional features trained independently from other tasks like image classification. In this work, we present an end-to-end lightweight network architecture, namely DCFNet, to learn the convolutional features and perform the correlation tracking process simultaneously. Specifically, we treat DCF as a special correlation filter layer added in a Siamese network, and carefully derive the backpropagation through it by defining the network output as the probability heatmap of object location. Since the derivation is still carried out in Fourier frequency domain, the efficiency property of DCF is preserved. This enables our tracker to run at more than 60 FPS during test time, while achieving a significant accuracy gain compared with KCF using HoGs. Extensive evaluations on OTB-2013, OTB-2015, and VOT2015 benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed DCFNet tracker is competitive with several state-of-the-art trackers, while being more compact and much faster.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

CREST: Convolutional Residual Learning for Visual Tracking

Discriminative correlation filters (DCFs) have been shown to perform superiorly in visual tracking. They only need a small set of training samples from the initial frame to generate an appearance model. However, existing DCFs learn the filters separately from feature extraction, and update these filters using a moving average operation with an empirical weight. These DCF trackers hardly benefit from the end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose the CREST algorithm to reformulate DCFs as a one-layer convolutional neural network. Our method integrates feature extraction, response map generation as well as model update into the neural networks for an end-to-end training. To reduce model degradation during online update, we apply residual learning to take appearance changes into account. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CREST tracker performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers.Comment: ICCV 2017. Project page: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~yibisong/iccv17/index.htm