Rotation-aware correlation filters for robust visual tracking

Recent years have witnessed several modified discriminative correlation filter (DCF) models exhibiting excellent performance in visual tracking. A fundamental drawback to these methods is that rotation of the target is not well addressed which leads to model deterioration. In this paper, we propose a novel rotation-aware correlation filter to address the issue. Specifically, samples used for training of the modified DCF model are rectified when rotation occurs, rotation angle is effectively calculated using phase correlation after transforming the search patch from Cartesian coordinates to the Log-polar coordinates, and an adaptive selection mechanism is further adopted to choose between a rectified target patch and a rectangular patch. Moreover, we extend the proposed approach for robust tracking by introducing a simple yet effective Kalman filter prediction strategy. Extensive experiments on five standard benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods while running in real-time on single CPU.