Mining Spatial-Temporal Similarity for Visual Tracking

Correlation filter (CF) is a critical technique to improve accuracy and speed in the field of visual object tracking. Despite being studied extensively, most existing CF methods suffer from failing to make the most of the inherent spatial-temporal prior of videos. To address this limitation, as consecutive frames are eminently resemble in most videos, we investigate a novel scheme to predict targets' future state by exploiting previous observations. Specifically, in this paper, we propose a prediction based CF tracking framework by learning the spatial-temporal similarity of consecutive frames for sample managing, template regularization, and training response pre-weighting. We model the learning problem theoretically as a novel objective and provide effective optimization algorithms to solve the learning task. In addition, we implement two CF trackers with different features. Extensive experiments are conducted on three popular benchmarks to validate our scheme. The encouraging results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly boost the accuracy of CF tracking, and the two trackers achieve competitive performances against state-of-the-art trackers. We finally present a comprehensive analysis on the efficacy of our proposed method and the efficiency of our trackers to facilitate real-world visual tracking applications.