Robust Visual Tracking Based on Relaxed Target Representation

Abstract

Developing an effective target appearance model is a challenging task in visual tracking under the influences of complicated appearance variations. Many tracking algorithms use a linear combination of previous tracking results to represent a target candidate. In existing target representations, all of the feature elements of a target candidate have the same coding vector. With such type of target representations, robust tracking is not satisfactory when drastic appearance variations occur. In this work, we present a novel appearance model for visual tracking. The proposed appearance model considers the similarity and the distinctiveness of the feature elements of a target candidate. The feature elements should share some similarity to jointly represent a target pattern. We exploit the distinctiveness of feature elements to represent the different importance by introducing a weighted regularization term in the appearance model. A more stable and discriminative target representation is obtained. Superior performance on challenging sequences against state-of-the-art trackers show the robustness of the novel appearance model and the proposed tracker.