Noise-Aware Framework for Robust Visual Tracking

Both siamese network and correlation filter (CF)-based trackers have exhibited superior performance by formulating tracking as a similarity measure problem, where a similarity map is learned by the correlation between a target template and a region of interest (ROI) with a cosine window. Nevertheless, this window function is usually fixed for various targets and not changed, undergoing significant noise variations during tracking, which easily makes model drift. In this article, we focus on the study of a noise-aware (NA) framework for robust visual tracking. To this end, the impact of various window functions is first investigated in visual tracking. We identify that the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of windowed ROIs makes the above trackers degenerate. At the prediction phase, a novel NA window customized for visual tracking is introduced to improve the SNR of windowed ROIs by adaptively suppressing the variable noise according to the observation of similarity maps. In addition, to further optimize the SNR of windowed pyramid ROIs for scale estimation, we propose to use the particle filter to dynamically sample several windowed ROIs with more favorable signals in temporal domains instead of this pyramid ROIs extracted in spatial domains. Extensive experiments on the popular OTB-2013, OTB-50, OTB-2015, VOT2017, TC128, UAV123, UAV123@10fps, UAV20L, and LaSOT datasets show that our NA framework can be extended to many siamese and CF trackers and our variants obtain superior performance than baseline trackers with a modest impact on efficiency.