Visual Tracking Framework Research Articles

HKSiamFC: Visual-Tracking Framework Using Prior Information Provided by Staple and Kalman Filter.

In the field of visual tracking, trackers based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) have had significant achievements. The fully-convolutional Siamese (SiamFC) tracker is a typical representation of these CNN trackers and has attracted much attention. It models visual tracking as a similarity-learning problem. However, experiments showed that SiamFC was not so robust in some complex environments. This may be because the tracker lacked enough prior information about the target. Inspired by the key idea of a Staple tracker and Kalman filter, we constructed two more models to help compensate for SiamFC’s disadvantages. One model contained the target’s prior color information, and the other the target’s prior trajectory information. With these two models, we design a novel and robust tracking framework on the basis of SiamFC. We call it Histogram–Kalman SiamFC (HKSiamFC). We also evaluated HKSiamFC tracker’s performance on dataset of the online object tracking benchmark (OTB) and Temple Color (TC128), and it showed quite competitive performance when compared with the baseline tracker and several other state-of-the-art trackers.

Multi-Feature Fusion in Particle Filter Framework for Visual Tracking

In this article, a particle filter based tracking algorithm is proposed to track a target in video with vivid and complex environments. The target is represented in feature space by both color distribution and KAZE features. Color distribution is selected for its robustness to target’s scale variation and partial occlusion. KAZE features are chosen for their ability to represent the target structure and also for their superior performance in feature matching. Fusion of these two features will lead to effective tracking as compared to other features due to their better representational abilities, under challenging conditions. The trajectory of the target is established using the particle filter algorithm based on similarity between the extracted features from the target and the probable candidates in the consecutive frames. For the color distribution model, Bhattacharya coefficient is used as a similarity metric whereas Nearest Neighbor Distance Ratio is used for matching of corresponding feature points in KAZE algorithm. The particle filter update model is based on kinematic motion equations and the weights on particles are governed by an equation fusing both the color and KAZE features. Centre Location Error, Average Tracking Accuracy and Tracking Success Rate are the performance metrics considered in the evaluation process. Also, the overlap success plot and precision plot is considered for performance evaluation. On the basis of these metrics and visual results obtained under different environment conditions: outdoor, occluding and underwater ones, the proposed tracking scheme performs significantly better than the contemporary feature-based iterative object tracking methods and even few of the learning-based algorithms.

Robust visual tracking with correlation filters and metric learning

Discriminative correlation filters (DCFs) have been widely used in the visual tracking community in recent years. The DCFs-based trackers determine the target location through a response map generated by the correlation filters and determine the target scale by a fixed scale factor. However, the response map is vulnerable to noise interference and the fixed scale factor also cannot reflect the real scale change of the target, which can obviously reduce the tracking performance. In this paper, to solve the aforementioned drawbacks, we propose to learn a metric learning model in correlation filters framework for visual tracking (called CFML). This model can use a metric learning function to solve the target scale problem. In particular, we adopt a hard negative mining strategy to alleviate the influence of the noise on the response map, which can effectively improve the tracking accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CFML tracker achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art trackers.

Novel visual tracking approach via ant lion optimiser

Ant lion optimiser (ALO) is a new nature-inspired swarm intelligence optimisation algorithm that mimics the hunting mechanism of antlions in nature. ALO has been proved to have the merits of high exploitation and convergence speed benefiting from adaptive boundary shrinking mechanism and elitism. In this work, visual tracking is expressed as searching for object in whole search space by interaction between antlions and ants. A novel ALO-based visual tracking framework is proposed and the adaptation and sensitivity of the parameters in ALO are discussed to improve tracking performance. In addition, considering that ALO tracker needs a lot of iteration consumption, kernel correlation filter with deep feature is integrated into the ALO tracking framework (ALOKCF) to improve track efficiency. Extensive experimental results prove that the ALO tracker is very competitive compared to other trackers, especially for abrupt motion tracking. At the same time, two visual tracking benchmarks are used to verify ALOKCF tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Global Motion-Aware Robust Visual Object Tracking for Electro Optical Targeting Systems.

Although recently developed trackers have shown excellent performance even when tracking fast moving and shape changing objects with variable scale and orientation, the trackers for the electro-optical targeting systems (EOTS) still suffer from abrupt scene changes due to frequent and fast camera motions by pan-tilt motor control or dynamic distortions in field environments. Conventional context aware (CA) and deep learning based trackers have been studied to tackle these problems, but they have the drawbacks of not fully overcoming the problems and dealing with their computational burden. In this paper, a global motion aware method is proposed to address the fast camera motion issue. The proposed method consists of two modules: (i) a motion detection module, which is based on the change in image entropy value, and (ii) a background tracking module, used to track a set of features in consecutive images to find correspondences between them and estimate global camera movement. A series of experiments is conducted on thermal infrared images, and the results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the robustness of all trackers with a minimal computational overhead. We show that the proposed method can be easily integrated into any visual tracking framework and can be applied to improve the performance of EOTS applications.

SIFT-Based Visual Tracking using Optical Flow and Belief Propagation Algorithm

Abstract Perceptible visual tracking acts as an important module for distinct perception tasks of autonomous robots. Better features help in easier decision-making process. The evaluation of tracking objects, dynamic positions and their visual information in results are quite difficult tasks. Until now, most real-time visual tracking algorithms suffer from poor robustness and low occurrence as they deal with complex real-world data. In this paper, we have proposed more robust and faster visual tracking framework using scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and the optical flow in belief propagation (BF) algorithm for efficient processing in real scenarios. Here, a new feature-based optical flow along with BF algorithm is utilized to compute the affine matrix of a regional center on SIFT key points in frames. Experimental results depict that the proposed approach is more efficient and more robust in comparison with the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms with more complex scenarios.

A multiple feature fused model for visual object tracking via correlation filters

Common tracking algorithms only use a single feature to describe the target appearance, which makes the appearance model easily disturbed by noise. Furthermore, the tracking performance and robustness of these trackers are obviously limited. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple feature fused model into a correlation filter framework for visual tracking to improve the tracking performance and robustness of the tracker. In different tracking scenarios, the response maps generated by the correlation filter framework are different for each feature. Based on these response maps, different features can use an adaptive weighting function to eliminate noise interference and maintain their respective advantages. It can enhance the tracking performance and robustness of the tracker efficiently. Meanwhile, the correlation filter framework can provide a fast training and accurate locating mechanism. In addition, we give a simple yet effective scale variation detection method, which can appropriately handle scale variation of the target in the tracking sequences. We evaluate our tracker on OTB2013/OTB50/OBT2015 benchmarks, which are including more than 100 video sequences. Extensive experiments on these benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MFFT tracker performs favorably against the state-of-the-art trackers.

Unifying Temporal Context and Multi-Feature With Update-Pacing Framework for Visual Tracking

Model drifting is one of the knotty problems that seriously restricts the accuracy of discriminative trackers in visual tracking. Most existing works usually focus on improving the robustness of the target appearance model. However, they are prone to suffer from model drifting due to the inappropriate model updates during the tracking-by-detection. In this paper, we propose a novel update-pacing framework to suppress the occurrence of model drifting in visual tracking. Specifically, the proposed framework first initializes an ensemble of trackers, each of which updates the model in a different update interval. Once the forward tracking trajectory of each tracker is determined, the backward trajectory will also be generated by the current model to measure the difference with the forward one, and the tracker with the smallest deviation score will be selected as the most robust tracker for the remaining tracking. By performing such self-examination on trajectory pairs, the framework can effectively preserve the temporal context consistency of sequential frames to avoid learning corrupted information. To further improve the performance of the proposed method, a multi-feature extension framework is also proposed to incorporate multiple features into the ensemble of the trackers. The extensive experimental results obtained on large-scale object tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly increases the accuracy and robustness of the underlying base trackers, such as DSST, Struck, KCF, and CT, and achieves superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods without using deep models.

Real-Time Event-Triggered Object Tracking in the Presence of Model Drift and Occlusion

In this paper, we propose a novel event-triggered tracking framework for fast and robust visual tracking in the presence of model drift and occlusion. The resulting tracker not only operates in real time, but also is resilient to tracking failures caused by factors such as fast motion and heavy occlusion. Specifically, the tracker consists of an event-triggered decision model as the core module that coordinates other functional modules, including a short-term tracker, occlusion and drift identification, target redetection, short-term tracker updating, and online discriminative learning for a detector. Each functional module is associated with a defined event that is triggered when the proposed conditions are met. The occlusion and drift identification module is intended to perform online evaluation of the short-term tracking. When a model drift event occurs, the target redetection module is activated by the event-triggered decision model to relocate the target and reinitialize the short-term tracker. The short-term tracker updating is carried out at each frame with a variable learning rate depending on the degree of occlusion. A sampling pool is constructed to store discriminative samples that are used to update the detector model. Extensive experiments on large benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm can effectively detect model drift and restore tracking, and more importantly, it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.

BIM-Tracker: A model-based visual tracking approach for indoor localisation using a 3D building model

This article presents an accurate and robust visual indoor localisation approach that not only is infrastructure-free, but also avoids accumulation error by taking advantage of (1) the widespread ubiquity of mobile devices with cameras and (2) the availability of 3D building models for most modern buildings. Localisation is performed by matching image sequences captured by a camera, with a 3D model of the building in a model-based visual tracking framework. Comprehensive evaluation of the approach with a photo-realistic synthetic dataset shows the robustness of the localisation approach under challenging conditions. Additionally, the approach is tested and evaluated on real data captured by a smartphone. The results of the experiments indicate that a localisation accuracy better than 10 cm can be achieved by using this approach. Since localisation errors do not accumulate the proposed approach is suitable for indoor localisation tasks for long periods of time and augmented reality applications, without requiring any local infrastructure. A MATLAB implementation can be found on https://github.com/debaditya-unimelb/BIM-Tracker.

Online single and multiple analysis dictionary learning-based approach for visual object tracking

In recent years, various synthesis dictionary learning-based techniques have been applied for the task of visual object tracking. However, there are challenges in the representation ability of the target and the background using a synthesis dictionary. Owing to such challenges, the target in a given video sequence is not tracked very efficiently. We propose an online analysis dictionary learning framework for visual tracking. Our main motivation stems from the fact that analysis dictionary is able to capture significantly more variability in the data as compared to a synthesis dictionary of the same dimensions. We make use of single and multiple analysis dictionaries in our work. In order to leverage the advantage of multiple dictionaries, we adaptively fuse them. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses analysis dictionary for visual tracking. We use the entire OTB-50 dataset to evaluate the performance of proposed trackers. Our experiments show a significant improvement over existing synthesis dictionary learning approaches. This makes our approach much more preferable over the conventional approaches that use synthesis dictionary learning model for visual tracking.

Robust Object Tracking via Local Sparse Appearance Model.

In this paper, we propose a novel local sparse representation-based tracking framework for visual tracking. To deeply mine the appearance characteristics of different local patches, the proposed method divides all local patches of a candidate target into three categories, which are stable patches, valid patches, and invalid patches. All these patches are assigned different weights to consider the different importance of the local patches. For stable patches, we introduce a local sparse score to identify them, and discriminative local sparse coding is developed to decrease the weights of background patches among the stable patches. For valid patches and invalid patches, we adopt local linear regression to distinguish the former from the latter. Furthermore, we propose a weight shrinkage method to determine weights for different valid patches to make our patch weight computation more reasonable. Experimental results on public tracking benchmarks with challenging sequences demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against other state-of-the-art tracking methods.

Inverse Nonnegative Local Coordinate Factorization for Visual Tracking

Recently, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with part-based representation has been widely used for appearance modeling in visual tracking. Unfortunately, not all the targets can be successfully decomposed as “parts” unless some rigorous conditions are satisfied. To avoid this problem, this paper introduces NMF’s variants into the visual tracking framework in the view of data clustering for appearance modeling. First, an initial target appearance model based on NMF is proposed to describe the target’s appearance with the incorporated local coordinate factorization constraint, orthogonality of the bases, and $L_{1,1}$ norm regularized sparse residual error constraint. Second, an inverse NMF model is proposed in which each learned base vector is regarded as a clustering center in a low-dimensional subspace. Potential target samples (from the foreground) will be clustered around base vectors, while the candidate samples (from the background) are very likely to spread irregularly over the entire clustering space. Such differences can be fully exploited by the inverse NMF model to produce more discriminative encoding vectors than the conventional NMF method. Furthermore, incremental updating model is introduced into the tracking framework for online updating the initial appearance model. Experiments on object tracking benchmark suggest that our tracker is able to achieve promising performance when compared with some state-of-the-art methods in deformation, occlusion, and other challenging situations.

Collaborative model based UAV tracking via local kernel feature

Partial occlusion is one of a challenging problem in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative model based tracking method which attempts to exploit a holistic model and a part model that tracks an object consistently through the entire video sequence. Specifically, we first develop a robust local kernel feature which learns the data around to encode the geometric information of the object. Next, the target is divided into four parts. And structure support vector machine (SSVM) is employed to integrate with the local feature to a robust visual tracking framework. Furthermore, we adopt a reliable metric to measure the reliability of a patch. Kalman filter is used to fuse the holistic model and part model tracking results smoothly according to the metric. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our tracker achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods.

Discriminative tracking via supervised tensor learning

Abstract Discriminative tracking algorithms have witnessed continued progress for distinguishing the target from background in unconstrained environments. The learning and detection task in existing visual tracking methods often convert a multidimensional data array into a vector-based observation. By altering the 2-D spatial structure of the image, transformation variants and global noises influence the discriminative ability of target representation, often result in degradation of performance. Different from vector representations, this paper presents a tensor-based large margin discriminative framework for visual tracking that utilizes the supervised tensor learning. In our method, an online structured support tensor classifier is designed which produces the multi-linear decision function, incorporating the nonlinearity of tensor-based feature over the target. In order to provide better spatial cues of target representation against noises and facilitate online tracking, we further introduce truncated tucker decomposition in structured multi-linear learning. The proposed algorithm poses an effective parameter tensor reconstruction in the classifier updating procedure and has a robust discriminative ability against several video background variants. Furthermore, a tensor block coordinate descent optimization is presented to achieve a closed form solution specific to the proposed truncated structured Tucker machine (TSTM). Experiment results on a recent comprehensive tracking benchmark demonstrate a promising performance of the proposed method subjectively and objectively compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Dilated-aware discriminative correlation filter for visual tracking

Recent progress has witnessed continued attention in discriminative correlation filter (DCF) tracking algorithms due to its high-efficiency. However, the existing DCF inevitably introduces some cyclic repetitions in learning and detection, which might lead to the heavy drift problem encountered in significant appearance variants owing to occlusion, deformation and motion blur. In this paper, we propose a dilated-aware discriminative correlation filter framework for visual tracking, which fully exploits multi-scale receptive contextual information of correlation filter to mitigate the impact of unwanted boundary and model degradation. On the premise of nondestructive filtering structure, our method adopts a simple formulation based on Kronecker product over discriminative correlation filter. By hands of multiple dilated factors perceive the multi-level spatial receptive map on objects. The framework learns a reliable response map by the residual understanding of multiple factor-dilated correlations filters. Furthermore, experiment results in a recent comprehensive tracking benchmark demonstrate a promising performance of the proposed method subjectively and objectively compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Exploiting Spatial-Temporal Locality of Tracking via Structured Dictionary Learning.

In this paper, a novel spatial-temporal locality is proposed and unified via a discriminative dictionary learning framework for visual tracking. By exploring the strong local correlations between temporally obtained target and their spatially distributed nearby background neighbors, a spatial-temporal locality is obtained. The locality is formulated as a subspace model and exploited under a unified structure of discriminative dictionary learning with a subspace structure. Using the learned dictionary, the target and its background can be described and distinguished effectively through their sparse codes. As a result, the target is localized by integrating both the descriptive and the discriminative qualities. Extensive experiments on various challenging video sequences demonstrate the superior performance of proposed algorithm over the other state-of-the-art approaches.

Learning Common and Feature-Specific Patterns: A Novel Multiple-Sparse-Representation-Based Tracker.

The use of multiple features has been shown to be an effective strategy for visual tracking because of their complementary contributions to appearance modeling. The key problem is how to learn a fused representation from multiple features for appearance modeling. Different features extracted from the same object should share some commonalities in their representations while each feature should also have some feature-specific representation patterns which reflect its complementarity in appearance modeling. Different from existing multi-feature sparse trackers which only consider the commonalities among the sparsity patterns of multiple features, this paper proposes a novel multiple sparse representation framework for visual tracking which jointly exploits the shared and feature-specific properties of different features by decomposing multiple sparsity patterns. Moreover, we introduce a novel online multiple metric learning to efficiently and adaptively incorporate the appearance proximity constraint, which ensures that the learned commonalities of multiple features are more representative. Experimental results on tracking benchmark videos and other challenging videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker.

Visual tracking via crossing-bin histogram Bhattacharyya similarity

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to improve the robustness of the traditional Bhattacharyya metric for the effect of histogram quantization in the histogram-based visual tracking. However, the traditional Bhattacharyya metric neglects the correlation of crossing-bin and is not robust for the effect of histogram quantization.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors propose a visual tracking method via crossing-bin histogram Bhattacharyya similarity in the particle filter.FindingsA crossing-bin matrix is introduced into the traditional Bhattacharyya similarity for measuring the reference histogram and the candidate histogram, and the basic tasks of measure such as maximum similarity of self and the triangle inequality are proven. The authors use the proposed measure in the particle filter visual tracking framework and address a model update strategy based on the crossing-bin histogram Bhattacharyya similarity to improve the robustness of visual tracking.Originality/valueIn the experiments using the famous challenging benchmark sequences, precision of the proposed method increases by 12.8 per cent comparing the traditional Bhattacharyya similarity and the cost time decreases by 38 times comparing the incremental Bhattacharyya similarity. The experimental results show that the proposed method can track the object robustly and rapidly under illumination change and occlusion.

Visual tracking via probabilistic collaborative representation

We present a probabilistic collaborative representation method under Bayesian framework for visual tracking. First, principal component analysis (PCA) basis vectors and squared templates are used to model the appearance of tracked object. Second, to decline the high complexity in traditional tracking methods via sparse representation, we demonstrate the mechanism of a probabilistic collaborative representation method and propose a fast method for computing the coefficients. Third, we introduce a PCA basis vectors update mechanism for the appearance change of the tracked object. Experiments on challenging videos demonstrate that our method can achieve better tracking results in terms of lower center location error and higher overlap rate.