Robust Online Tracking With Meta-Updater

In a sequence, the appearance of both the target and background often changes dramatically. Offline-trained models may not handle huge appearance variations well, causing tracking failures. Most discriminative trackers address this issue by introducing an online update scheme, making the model dynamically adapt the changes of the target and background. Although the online update scheme plays an important role in improving the tracker's accuracy, it inevitably pollutes the model with noisy observation samples. It is necessary to reduce the risk of the online update scheme for better tracking. In this work, we propose a novel offline-trained Meta-Updater to address an important but unsolved problem: Is the tracker ready for updating in the current frame? The proposed module can effectively integrate geometric, discriminative, and appearance cues in a sequential manner, and then mine the sequential information with a designed cascaded LSTM module. Moreover, we strengthen the effect of appearance information on the module, i.e., the additional local outlier factor is introduced to integrate into a newly designed network. We integrate our meta-updater into eight different types of online update trackers. Extensive experiments on four long-term and two short-term tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our meta-updater is effective and has strong generalization ability.