Improving Siamese Based Trackers with Light or No Training through Multiple Templates and Temporal Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a training-free framework for Siamese-based trackers that enhances performance by using multiple adaptive templates and a lightweight temporal network, applicable across various datasets and tracker architectures.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach combining adaptive template updating and a universal temporal network, eliminating the need for retraining and improving tracking accuracy.

Findings

Improved performance on multiple datasets including LaSOT and TrackingNet.

Effective with both convolutional and transformer-based trackers.

Achieved better robustness to target appearance changes.

Abstract

High computational power and significant time are usually needed to train a deep learning based tracker on large datasets. Depending on many factors, training might not always be an option. In this paper, we propose a framework with two ideas on Siamese-based trackers. (i) Extending number of templates in a way that removes the need to retrain the network and (ii) a lightweight temporal network with a novel architecture focusing on both local and global information that can be used independently from trackers. Most Siamese-based trackers only rely on the first frame as the ground truth for objects and struggle when the target's appearance changes significantly in subsequent frames in presence of similar distractors. Some trackers use multiple templates which mostly rely on constant thresholds to update, or they replace those templates that have low similarity scores only with more similar ones. Unlike previous works, we use adaptive thresholds that update the bag with similar templates as well as those templates which are slightly diverse. Adaptive thresholds also cause an overall improvement over constant ones. In addition, mixing feature maps obtained by each template in the last stage of networks removes the need to retrain trackers. Our proposed lightweight temporal network, CombiNet, learns the path history of different objects using only object coordinates and predicts target's potential location in the next frame. It is tracker independent and applying it on new trackers does not need further training. By implementing these ideas, trackers' performance improved on all datasets tested on, including LaSOT, LaSOT extension, TrackingNet, OTB100, OTB50, UAV123 and UAV20L. Experiments indicate the proposed framework works well with both convolutional and transformer-based trackers. The official python code for this paper will be publicly available upon publication.