Selective Spatial Regularization by Reinforcement Learned Decision Making for Object Tracking

Spatial regularization (SR) is known as an effective tool to alleviate the boundary effect of correlation filter (CF), a successful visual object tracking scheme, from which a number of state-of-the-art visual object trackers can be stemmed. Nevertheless, SR highly increases the optimization complexity of CF and its target-driven nature makes spatially-regularized CF trackers may easily lose the occluded targets or the targets surrounded by other similar objects. In this paper, we propose selective spatial regularization (SSR) for CF-tracking scheme. It can achieve not only higher accuracy and robustness, but also higher speed compared with spatially-regularized CF trackers. Specifically, rather than simply relying on foreground information, we extend the objective function of CF tracking scheme to learn the target-context-regularized filters using target-context-driven weight maps. We then formulate the online selection of these weight maps as a decision making problem by a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the learning of weight map selection is equivalent to policy learning of the MDP that is solved by a reinforcement learning strategy. Moreover, by adding a special state, representing not-updating filters, in the MDP, we can learn when to skip unnecessary or erroneous filter updating, thus accelerating the online tracking. Finally, the proposed SSR is used to equip three popular spatially-regularized CF trackers to significantly boost their tracking accuracy, while achieving much faster online tracking speed. Besides, extensive experiments on five benchmarks validate the effectiveness of SSR.