GOA-net: generic occlusion aware networks for visual tracking

Occlusion is a frequent phenomenon that hinders the task of visual object tracking. Since occlusion can be from any object and in any shape, data augmentation techniques will not greatly help identify or mitigate the tracker loss. Some of the existing works deal with occlusion only in an unsupervised manner. This paper proposes a generic deep learning framework for identifying occlusion in a given frame by formulating it as a supervised classification task for the first time. The proposed architecture introduces an “occlusion classification” branch into supervised trackers. This branch helps in the effective learning of features and also provides occlusion status for each frame. A metric is proposed to measure the performance of trackers under occlusion at frame level. The efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated on two supervised tracking paradigms: One is from the most commonly used Siamese region proposal class of trackers, and another from the emerging transformer-based trackers. This framework is tested on six diverse datasets (GOT-10k, LaSOT, OTB2015, TrackingNet, UAV123, and VOT2018), and it achieved significant improvements in performance over the corresponding baselines while performing on par with the state-of-the-art trackers. The contributions in this work are more generic, as any supervised tracker can easily adopt them.