Sparse learning-based correlation filter for robust tracking

Many objective tracking methods are based on the framework of correlation filtering (CF) due to its high efficiency. In this paper, we propose a $l_{2}$ -norm based sparse response regularization term to restrain unexpected crests in response for CF framework. CF trackers learn online to regress the region of interest into a Gaussian response. However, due to the uncertain transformations of tracked object, there are many unexpected crests in the response map. When the response of tracked object is corrupted by other crests, the tracker will lost the object. Therefore, the sparse response is used to increase the robustness to transformations of tracked object. Since the novel term is directly incorporated into the objective function of the CF framework, it can be used to improve the performance of many methods which are based on this framework. Moreover, from the solutions we derive, the new method will not increase the computational complexity. Through the experiments on benchmarks of OTB-100, TempleColor, VOT2016 and VOT2017, the proposed regularization term can improve the tracking performance of various CF trackers, including those based on standard discriminative CF framework and those based on context-aware CF framework. We also embed the sparse response regularization term in the state-of-the-art integrated tracker MCCT to test its generalization performance. Although MCCT is an expert integrated tracker and owns an exquisite algorithm for selecting experts, the experimental results show that our method can still improve its long-term tracking performance without increasing computational complexity. © 1992-2012 IEEE.