Fast Dynamic Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast visual tracking algorithm combining CNN-based MDNet and RoIAlign, significantly improving speed while maintaining high precision, suitable for real-time applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel combination of RoIAlign with MDNet to accelerate CNN-based tracking without sacrificing accuracy.

Findings

Achieved 7x speedup over MDNet

Maintained high tracking precision at around 7 fps

Validated on OTB100 and VOT2016 benchmarks

Abstract

Most of the existing tracking methods based on CNN(convolutional neural networks) are too slow for real-time application despite the excellent tracking precision compared with the traditional ones. In this paper, a fast dynamic visual tracking algorithm combining CNN based MDNet(Multi-Domain Network) and RoIAlign was developed. The major problem of MDNet also lies in the time efficiency. Considering the computational complexity of MDNet is mainly caused by the large amount of convolution operations and fine-tuning of the network during tracking, a RoIPool layer which could conduct the convolution over the whole image instead of each RoI is added to accelerate the convolution and a new strategy of fine-tuning the fully-connected layers is used to accelerate the update. With RoIPool employed, the computation speed has been increased but the tracking precision has dropped simultaneously. RoIPool could lose some positioning precision because it can not handle locations represented by floating numbers. So RoIAlign, instead of RoIPool, which can process floating numbers of locations by bilinear interpolation has been added to the network. The results show the target localization precision has been improved and it hardly increases the computational cost. These strategies can accelerate the processing and make it 7x faster than MDNet with very low impact on precision and it can run at around 7 fps. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on two benchmarks: OTB100 and VOT2016, on which high precision and speed have been obtained. The influence of the network structure and training data are also discussed with experiments.