Robust Correlation Filter Tracking with Shepherded Instance-Aware Proposals

In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN) based correlation filter trackers have achieved state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets. However, the CNN based correlation filters cannot effectively handle large scale variation and distortion (such as fast motion, background clutter, occlusion, etc.), leading to the sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN based correlation filter tracker with shepherded instance-aware proposals, namely DeepCFIAP, which automatically estimates the target scale in each frame and re-detects the target when distortion happens. DeepCFIAP is proposed to take advantage of the merits of both instance-aware proposals and CNN based correlation filters. Compared with the CNN based correlation filter trackers, DeepCFIAP can successfully solve the problems of large scale variation and distortion via the shepherded instance-aware proposals, resulting in more robust tracking performance. Specifically, we develop a novel proposal ranking algorithm based on the similarities between proposals and instances. In contrast to the detection proposal based trackers, DeepCFIAP shepherds the instance-aware proposals towards their optimal positions via the CNN based correlation filters, resulting in more accurate tracking results. Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DeepCFIAP performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers and it is especially feasible for long-term tracking.