Improved Hierarchical Convolutional Features for Robust Visual Object Tracking

Abstract

The target and background will change continuously in the long‐term tracking process, which brings great challenges to the accurate prediction of targets. The correlation filter algorithm based on manual features is difficult to meet the actual needs due to its limited feature representation ability. Thus, to improve the tracking performance and robustness, an improved hierarchical convolutional features model is proposed into a correlation filter framework for visual object tracking. First, the objective function is designed by lasso regression modeling, and a sparse, time‐series low‐rank filter is learned to increase the interpretability of the model. Second, the features of the last layer and the second pool layer of the convolutional neural network are extracted to realize the target position prediction from coarse to fine. In addition, using the filters learned from the first frame and the current frame to calculate the response maps, respectively, the target position is obtained by finding the maximum response value in the response map. The filter model is updated only when these two maximum responses meet the threshold condition. The proposed tracker is evaluated by simulation analysis on TC‐128/OTB2015 benchmarks including more than 100 video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed tracker achieves competitive performance against state‐of‐the‐art trackers. The distance precision rate and overlap success rate of the proposed algorithm on OTB2015 are 0.829 and 0.695, respectively. The proposed algorithm effectively solves the long‐term object tracking problem in complex scenes.