Learning Regression Distribution: Information Diffusion from Template to Search for Visual Object Tracking

Abstract

Article Learning Regression Distribution: Information Diffusion from Template to Search for Visual Object Tracking Shuo Hu *, Jinbo Lu, and Sien Zhou 1 School of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao 066000, China * Correspondence: hus@ysu.edu.cn     Received: 5 July 2023 Accepted: 19 October 2023 Published: 26 March 2024   Abstract: The general paradigm of traditional Siamese networks involves using cross-correlations to fuse features from the backbone, and this paradigm is limited by the inductive bias of the convolution kernel, resulting in the lack of global information. In this paper, we propose the Siamese learning regression distribution (SiamLRD) to address the local limitations of traditional cross-correlation operations on feature fusion and weak self-connections between features within different branches. The SiamLRD uses the cross-attention mechanism to replace cross-correlations between the features of the target region of interest and the template so as to enhance flexibility. Firstly, the original transformer structure is improved to be suitable for convolutional Siamese networks. The improved transformer architecture is then used to replace cross-correlation operations, resulting in more comprehensive feature fusion between branches. Secondly, we introduce a new decoder structure into the novel fusion strategy to enhance the correlation between classification scores and regression accuracy during decoding. Multiple benchmarks are used to test the proposed SiamLRD approach, and it is verified that the proposed approach improves the baseline with 5.8% in terms of AO and 9.7% in terms of SR0.75 on the GOT-10K dataset.