Tracking by Joint Local and Global Search: A Target-aware Attention based Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces TANet, a novel target-aware attention mechanism that combines local and global search strategies with adversarial training to improve robustness in single object tracking, especially under challenging conditions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new target-aware attention mechanism (TANet) integrated with tracking-by-detection, utilizing adversarial training for enhanced global and local search in object tracking.

Findings

Effective in handling occlusion and fast motion scenarios.

Improves robustness over traditional local search methods.

Validated on multiple benchmark datasets.

Abstract

Tracking-by-detection is a very popular framework for single object tracking which attempts to search the target object within a local search window for each frame. Although such local search mechanism works well on simple videos, however, it makes the trackers sensitive to extremely challenging scenarios, such as heavy occlusion and fast motion. In this paper, we propose a novel and general target-aware attention mechanism (termed TANet) and integrate it with tracking-by-detection framework to conduct joint local and global search for robust tracking. Specifically, we extract the features of target object patch and continuous video frames, then we concatenate and feed them into a decoder network to generate target-aware global attention maps. More importantly, we resort to adversarial training for better attention prediction. The appearance and motion discriminator networks are designed to ensure its consistency in spatial and temporal views. In the tracking procedure, we integrate the target-aware attention with multiple trackers by exploring candidate search regions for robust tracking. Extensive experiments on both short-term and long-term tracking benchmark datasets all validated the effectiveness of our algorithm. The project page of this paper can be found at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/globalattentiontracking/home/extend}.