One of the major challenges of model-free visual tracking problem has been the difficulty originating from the unpredictable and drastic changes in the appearance of objects we target to track. Existing methods tackle this problem by updating the appearance model on-line in order to adapt to the changes in the appearance. Despite the success of these methods however, inaccurate and erroneous updates of the appearance model result in a tracker drift. In this paper, we introduce a novel real-time visual tracking algorithm based on a template selection strategy constructed by deep reinforcement learning methods. The tracking algorithm utilizes this strategy to choose the appropriate template for tracking a given frame. The template selection strategy is self-learned by utilizing a simple policy gradient method on numerous training episodes randomly generated from a tracking benchmark dataset. Our proposed reinforcement learning framework is generally applicable to other confidence map based tracking algorithms. The experiment shows that our tracking algorithm runs in real-time speed of 43 fps and the proposed policy network effectively decides the appropriate template for successful visual tracking.
However, approaches such as @cite_5 @cite_12 use a naive on-line update strategy that cannot revise erroneous updates and recover from heavy occlusions. Moreover, approaches @cite_14 @cite_36 do not update the initial template, solely relying on the representation power of the pre-trained CNN. This approach may be effective for short-term video segments with no distractors, but the tracker can be attracted towards a distractor with a similar appearance to the target. Our proposed algorithm is aimed to solve both problems of the previous approaches, by utilizing previously seen examples to adapt to the recent appearance of the target and choosing the most adequate template for localizing the target, ruling out erroneously updated templates.
@cite_36 @cite_5 @cite_14 @cite_12
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Sparse representation has been applied to visual tracking by finding the best candidate with minimal reconstruction error using target templates. However most sparse representation based trackers only consider the holistic representation and do not make full use of the sparse coefficients to discriminate between the target and the background, and hence may fail with more possibility when there is similar object or occlusion in the scene. In this paper we develop a simple yet robust tracking method based on the structural local sparse appearance model. This representation exploits both partial information and spatial information of the target based on a novel alignment-pooling method. The similarity obtained by pooling across the local patches helps not only locate the target more accurately but also handle occlusion. In addition, we employ a template update strategy which combines incremental subspace learning and sparse representation. This strategy adapts the template to the appearance change of the target with less possibility of drifting and reduces the influence of the occluded target template as well. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging benchmark image sequences demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm performs favorably against several state-of-the-art methods. Deep neural networks, albeit their great success on feature learning in various computer vision tasks, are usually considered as impractical for online visual tracking, because they require very long training time and a large number of training samples. In this paper, we present an efficient and very robust tracking algorithm using a single convolutional neural network (CNN) for learning effective feature representations of the target object in a purely online manner. Our contributions are multifold. First, we introduce a novel truncated structural loss function that maintains as many training samples as possible and reduces the risk of tracking error accumulation. Second, we enhance the ordinary stochastic gradient descent approach in CNN training with a robust sample selection mechanism. The sampling mechanism randomly generates positive and negative samples from different temporal distributions, which are generated by taking the temporal relations and label noise into account. Finally, a lazy yet effective updating scheme is designed for CNN training. Equipped with this novel updating algorithm, the CNN model is robust to some long-existing difficulties in visual tracking, such as occlusion or incorrect detections, without loss of the effective adaption for significant appearance changes. In the experiment, our CNN tracker outperforms all compared state-of-the-art methods on two recently proposed benchmarks, which in total involve over 60 video sequences. The remarkable performance improvement over the existing trackers illustrates the superiority of the feature representations, which are learned purely online via the proposed deep learning framework. In this paper, we propose a robust visual tracking method by casting tracking as a sparse approximation problem in a particle filter framework. In this framework, occlusion, noise, and other challenging issues are addressed seamlessly through a set of trivial templates. Specifically, to find the tracking target in a new frame, each target candidate is sparsely represented in the space spanned by target templates and trivial templates. The sparsity is achieved by solving an l1-regularized least-squares problem. Then, the candidate with the smallest projection error is taken as the tracking target. After that, tracking is continued using a Bayesian state inference framework. Two strategies are used to further improve the tracking performance. First, target templates are dynamically updated to capture appearance changes. Second, nonnegativity constraints are enforced to filter out clutter which negatively resembles tracking targets. We test the proposed approach on numerous sequences involving different types of challenges, including occlusion and variations in illumination, scale, and pose. The proposed approach demonstrates excellent performance in comparison with previously proposed trackers. We also extend the method for simultaneous tracking and recognition by introducing a static template set which stores target images from different classes. The recognition result at each frame is propagated to produce the final result for the whole video. The approach is validated on a vehicle tracking and classification task using outdoor infrared video sequences. We focus on the one-shot learning for video-based person re-Identification (re-ID). Unlabeled tracklets for the person re-ID tasks can be easily obtained by preprocessing, such as pedestrian detection and tracking. In this paper, we propose an approach to exploiting unlabeled tracklets by gradually but steadily improving the discriminative capability of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature representation via stepwise learning. We first initialize a CNN model using one labeled tracklet for each identity. Then we update the CNN model by the following two steps iteratively: 1. sample a few candidates with most reliable pseudo labels from unlabeled tracklets; 2. update the CNN model according to the selected data. Instead of the static sampling strategy applied in existing works, we propose a progressive sampling method to increase the number of the selected pseudo-labeled candidates step by step. We systematically investigate the way how we should select pseudo-labeled tracklets into the training set to make the best use of them. Notably, the rank-1 accuracy of our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 21.46 points (absolute, i.e., 62.67 vs. 41.21 ) on the MARS dataset, and 16.53 points on the DukeMTMC-VideoReID dataset1.