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.
In this paper we present a tracker, which is radically different from state-of-the-art trackers: we apply no model updating, no occlusion detection, no combination of trackers, no geometric matching, and still deliver state-of-the-art tracking performance, as demonstrated on the popular online tracking benchmark (OTB) and six very challenging YouTube videos. The presented tracker simply matches the initial patch of the target in the first frame with candidates in a new frame and returns the most similar patch by a learned matching function. The strength of the matching function comes from being extensively trained generically, i.e., without any data of the target, using a Siamese deep neural network, which we design for tracking. Once learned, the matching function is used as is, without any adapting, to track previously unseen targets. It turns out that the learned matching function is so powerful that a simple tracker built upon it, coined Siamese INstance search Tracker, SINT, which only uses the original observation of the target from the first frame, suffices to reach state-of-the-art performance. Further, we show the proposed tracker even allows for target re-identification after the target was absent for a complete video shot. Motivated by recent successes on learning feature representations and on learning feature comparison functions, we propose a unified approach to combining both for training a patch matching system. Our system, dubbed Match-Net, consists of a deep convolutional network that extracts features from patches and a network of three fully connected layers that computes a similarity between the extracted features. To ensure experimental repeatability, we train MatchNet on standard datasets and employ an input sampler to augment the training set with synthetic exemplar pairs that reduce overfitting. Once trained, we achieve better computational efficiency during matching by disassembling MatchNet and separately applying the feature computation and similarity networks in two sequential stages. We perform a comprehensive set of experiments on standard datasets to carefully study the contributions of each aspect of MatchNet, with direct comparisons to established methods. Our results confirm that our unified approach improves accuracy over previous state-of-the-art results on patch matching datasets, while reducing the storage requirement for descriptors. We make pre-trained MatchNet publicly available. The problem of arbitrary object tracking has traditionally been tackled by learning a model of the object's appearance exclusively online, using as sole training data the video itself. Despite the success of these methods, their online-only approach inherently limits the richness of the model they can learn. Recently, several attempts have been made to exploit the expressive power of deep convolutional networks. However, when the object to track is not known beforehand, it is necessary to perform Stochastic Gradient Descent online to adapt the weights of the network, severely compromising the speed of the system. In this paper we equip a basic tracking algorithm with a novel fully-convolutional Siamese network trained end-to-end on the ILSVRC15 dataset for object detection in video. Our tracker operates at frame-rates beyond real-time and, despite its extreme simplicity, achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple benchmarks. Machine learning techniques are often used in computer vision due to their ability to leverage large amounts of training data to improve performance. Unfortunately, most generic object trackers are still trained from scratch online and do not benefit from the large number of videos that are readily available for offline training. We propose a method for offline training of neural networks that can track novel objects at test-time at 100 fps. Our tracker is significantly faster than previous methods that use neural networks for tracking, which are typically very slow to run and not practical for real-time applications. Our tracker uses a simple feed-forward network with no online training required. The tracker learns a generic relationship between object motion and appearance and can be used to track novel objects that do not appear in the training set. We test our network on a standard tracking benchmark to demonstrate our tracker's state-of-the-art performance. Further, our performance improves as we add more videos to our offline training set. To the best of our knowledge, our tracker is the first neural-network tracker that learns to track generic objects at 100 fps.  The main challenges of visual object tracking arise from the arbitrary appearance of the objects that need to be tracked. Most existing algorithms try to solve this problem by training a new model to regenerate or classify each tracked object. As a result, the model needs to be initialized and retrained for each new object. In this paper, we propose to track different objects in an object-independent approach with a novel two-flow convolutional neural network (YCNN). The YCNN takes two inputs (one is an object image patch, the other is a larger searching image patch), then outputs a response map which predicts how likely and where the object would appear in the search patch. Unlike the object-specific approaches, the YCNN is actually trained to measure the similarity between the two image patches. Thus, this model will not be limited to any specific object. Furthermore, the network is end-to-end trained to extract both shallow and deep dedicated convolutional features for visual tracking. And once properly trained, the YCNN can be used to track all kinds of objects without further training and updating. As a result, our algorithm is able to run at a very high speed of 45 frames-per-second. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm can also be proved by the experiments on two popular data sets: OTB-100 and VOT-2014.