A Collaborative Visual Tracking Architecture for Correlation Filter and Convolutional Neural Network Learning

Visual object tracking has achieved remarkable progress in recent years and has been broadly applied in intelligent transportation systems such as autonomous vehicles and drones to monitor and analyze the behavior of specific targets. One typical tracking approach is the discriminative tracker, which branches into two main categories: the correlation filter (CF) and the convolutional neural network (CNN). However, most of the current researches consider both categories as two separate techniques and only rely on one of them. Thus, a dense cooperation between the CF and the CNN still remains less discovered and the question of how to effectively join both techniques to further boost the tracking performance is still open. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a collaborative architecture which incorporates models constructed with both techniques and dynamically aggregates their response maps for target inference. By an alternating optimization, both models are learned on each other’s errors to persistently improve the classification power of the whole tracker. For further efficiency, we present a faster solver for our utilized CF and an analytical solution for dynamic model weighting. Through experiments on standard benchmarks, we reveal the influence of key factors on the joint learning architecture and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.