Object Tracking in Satellite Videos Based on Improved Kernel Correlation Filter Assisted by Road Information

Video satellites can stare at target areas on the Earth’s surface to obtain high-temporal-resolution remote sensing videos, which make it possible to track objects in satellite videos. However, it should be noted that the object size in satellite videos is usually small and has less textural property, and the moving objects in satellite videos are easily occluded, which puts forward higher requirements for the tracker. In order to solve the above problems, consider that the remote sensing image contains rich road information, which can be used to constrain the trajectory of the object in a satellite video, this paper proposes an improved Kernel Correlation Filter (KCF) assisted by road information to track small objects, especially when the object is occluded. Specifically, the contributions of this paper are as follows: First, the tracking confidence module is reconstructed, which integrates the peak response and the average peak correlation energy of the response map to more accurately judge whether the object is occluded. Then, an adaptive Kalman filter is designed to adaptively adjust the parameters of the Kalman filter according to the motion state of the object, which improves the robustness of tracking and reduces the tracking drift after the object is occluded. Last but not least, an object tracking strategy assisted by road information is recommended, which searches for objects with road information as constraints, to locate objects more accurately. After the above improvements, compared with the KCF tracker, our method improves the tracking precision by 35.9% and the tracking success rate by 18.1% with the tracking rate at a speed of 300 frames per second, which meets the real-time requirements.