Siamese networks with distractor-reduction method for long-term visual object tracking

Many trackers which divide the tracking process into two stages have recently been proposed to solve the problem of long-term tracking. Their outstanding performance makes them become one of the mainstream algorithms of long-term tracking. To further improve the performance of two-stage tracking algorithms, some improvements are proposed in this paper. (a) A hard negative mining method is proposed. It can optimize the training process of the verification network and bridge the gap between the two sub-networks. (b) The architecture of the verification network is designed as a Siamese structure; therefore, the semantic ambiguity in classification can be alleviated. Extensive experiments performed on benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, yielding 7% relative gain in the VOT2018-LT dataset and 14.2% relative gain in the OxUvA dataset.