Surrounding-aware correlation filter for UAV tracking with selective spatial regularization

Abstract

The great advance of visual object tracking has provided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with intriguing capability for various practical applications. With promising performance and efficiency, discriminative correlation filter-based trackers have drawn great attention and undergone remarkable progress. However, background interference and boundary effect remain two thorny problems. In this paper, a surrounding-aware tracker with selective spatial regularization (SASR) is presented. SASR tracker extracts surrounding samples according to the size and shape of the object in order to utilize context and maintain the integrality of the object. Additionally, a selective spatial regularizer is introduced to address boundary effect. Central coefficients in the filter are evenly regularized to preserve valid information from the object. While the others are penalized according to their spatial location. Under the framework of SASR tracker, surrounding information and selective spatial regularization prove to be complementary to each other, which actually did not draw much attention before. They managed to improve not only the robustness against various distractions in the surrounding but also the flexibility to catch up with frequent appearance change of the object. Qualitative evaluation and quantitative experiments on challenging UAV tracking sequences have shown that SASR tracker has performed favorably against 23 state-of-the-art trackers.