Motion-aware object tracking for aerial images with deep features and discriminative correlation filter

Abstract

AbstractObject tracking is a challenging task which is required for different problems such as surveillance, traffic analysis and human-computer interaction. The problem of tracking an object can be considered in different categories such as single object tracking, multiple object tracking, short-term tracking, long-term tracking, tracking by detection and detection-free tracking. This study focuses on detection-free tracking for ground targets on aerial images. The studies in the literature show that correlation filter and deep learning based object trackers perform well recently. This paper proposes a new correlation filter-based tracker containing a strategy for re-detection issue. We improve the performance of correlation filter-based tracker by adding a lightweight re-detection ability to the correlation filter tracker in case of a long occlusion or complete loss of target. We use deep features to train Discriminative Correlation Filter(DCF) by integrating sub-networks from pre-trained ResNet and SAND models. The experimental results on the popular UAV123L dataset show that the proposed method(MADCF) improves the performance of DCF tracker and have a reasonable performance for long-term tracking problem. Moreover, we prepare a new tracking dataset (PESMOD tracking) consisting of UAV images, and we evaluate the proposed method and state-of-the-art method in this dataset. We observed that the proposed method performs much better in ground target tracking from VIVID and PESMOD aerial datasets. The proposed MADCF tracker performs better for small targets tracked by UAVs compared to the deep learning-based trackers. The source code and prepared dataset are available at http://github.com/mribrahim/MADCF