An Enhanced Visual Object Tracking Approach based on Combined Features of Neural Networks, Wavelet Transforms, and Histogram of Oriented Gradients

Abstract

In this paper, a new Visual Object Tracking (VOT) approach is proposed to overcome the main problem the existing approaches encounter, i.e. the significant appearance changes which are mainly caused by heavy occlusion and illumination variation. The proposed approach is based on a combination of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features, and discrete wavelet packet transforms. The problem of illumination variation is solved by incorporating the coefficients of the image discrete wavelet packet transform instead of the image template to handle the case of images with high saturation in the input of the used CNN, whereas the inverse discrete wavelet packet transforms are used at the output for extracting the CNN features. By combining four learned correlation filters with the convolutional features, the target location is deduced using multichannel correlation maps at the CNN output. On the other side, the maximum value of the resulting maps from the correlation filters with convolutional features produced by the previously obtained HOG feature of the image template are calculated and are used as an updating parameter of the correlation filters extracted from CNN and from HOG. The major aim is to ensure long-term memory of the target appearance so that the target item may be recovered if tracking fails. In order to increase the performance of HOG, the coefficients of the discrete packet wavelet transform are employed instead of the image template. The obtained results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.