Siamese Regression Tracking With Reinforced Template Updating

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2021:30:628-640. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2020.3036723. Epub 2020 Dec 4.

Abstract

Siamese networks are prevalent in visual tracking because of the efficient localization. The networks take both a search patch and a target template as inputs where the target template is usually from the initial frame. Meanwhile, Siamese trackers do not update network parameters online for real-time efficiency. The fixed target template and CNN parameters make Siamese trackers not effective to capture target appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a template updating method via reinforcement learning for Siamese regression trackers. We collect a series of templates and learn to maintain them based on an actor-critic framework. Among this framework, the actor network that is trained by deep reinforcement learning effectively updates the templates based on the tracking result on each frame. Besides the target template, we update the Siamese regression tracker online to adapt to target appearance variations. The experimental results on the standard benchmarks show the effectiveness of both template and network updating. The proposed tracker SiamRTU performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches.