Robust Visual Object Tracking with Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Networks

The current deep learning based visual tracking approaches have been very successful by learning the target classification and/or estimation model from a large amount of supervised training data in offline mode. However, most of them can still fail in tracking objects due to some more challenging issues such as dense distractor objects, confusing background, motion blurs, and so on. Inspired by the human "visual tracking" capability which leverages motion cues to distinguish the target from the background, we propose a Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Network (TS-RCN) for visual tracking, which successfully exploits both appearance and motion features for model update. Our TS-RCN can be integrated with existing deep learning based visual trackers. To further improve the tracking performance, we adopt a "wider" residual network ResNeXt as its feature extraction backbone. To the best of our knowledge, TS-RCN is the first end-to-end trainable two-stream visual tracking system, which makes full use of both appearance and motion features of the target. We have extensively evaluated the TS-RCN on most widely used benchmark datasets including VOT2018, VOT2019, and GOT-10K. The experiment results have successfully demonstrated that our two-stream model can greatly outperform the appearance based tracker, and it also achieves state-of-the-art performance. The tracking system can run at up to 38.1 FPS

TDIOT: Target-driven Inference for Deep Video Object Tracking

Recent tracking-by-detection approaches use deep object detectors as target detection baseline, because of their high performance on still images. For effective video object tracking, object detection is integrated with a data association step performed by either a custom design inference architecture or an end-to-end joint training for tracking purpose. In this work, we adopt the former approach and use the pre-trained Mask R-CNN deep object detector as the baseline. We introduce a novel inference architecture placed on top of FPN-ResNet101 backbone of Mask R-CNN to jointly perform detection and tracking, without requiring additional training for tracking purpose. The proposed single object tracker, TDIOT, applies an appearance similarity-based temporal matching for data association. In order to tackle tracking discontinuities, we incorporate a local search and matching module into the inference head layer that exploits SiamFC for short term tracking. Moreover, in order to improve robustness to scale changes, we introduce a scale adaptive region proposal network that enables to search the target at an adaptively enlarged spatial neighborhood specified by the trace of the target. In order to meet long term tracking requirements, a low cost verification layer is incorporated into the inference architecture to monitor presence of the target based on its LBP histogram model. Performance evaluation on videos from VOT2016, VOT2018 and VOT-LT2018 datasets demonstrate that TDIOT achieves higher accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art short-term trackers while it provides comparable performance in long term tracking