TRBACF: Learning temporal regularized correlation filters for high performance online visual object tracking

Correlation filter-based trackers (CFTs) have recently shown remarkable performance in the field of visual object tracking. The advantage of these trackers originates from their ability to convert time-domain calculations into frequency domain calculations. However, a significant problem of these CFTs is that the model is insufficiently robust when the tracking scenarios are too complicated, meaning that the ideal tracking performance cannot be acquired. Recent work has attempted to resolve this problem by reducing the boundary effects from modeling the foreground and background of the object target effectively (e.g., CFLB, BACF, and CACF). Although these methods have demonstrated reasonable performance, they are often affected by occlusion, deformation, scale variation, and other challenging scenes. In this study, considering the relationship between the current frame and the previous frame of a moving object target in a time series, we propose a temporal regularization strategy to improve the BACF tracker (denoted as TRBACF), a typical representative of the aforementioned trackers. The TRBACF tracker can efficiently adjust the model to adapt the change of the tracking scenes, thereby enhancing its robustness and accuracy. Moreover, the objective function of our TRBACF tracker can be solved by an improved alternating direction method of multipliers, which can speed up the calculation in the Fourier domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TRBACF tracker achieves competitive tracking performance compared with state-of-the-art trackers.