SiamMAF: A multipath and feature-enhanced thermal infrared tracker

Thermal infrared (TIR) images are visually blurred and low in information content. Some TIR trackers focus on enhancing the semantic information of TIR features, neglecting the equally important detailed information for TIR tracking. After target localization, detailed information can assist the tracker in generating accurate prediction boxes. In addition, simple element-wise addition is not a way to fully utilize and fuse multiple response maps. To address these issues, this study proposes a multipath and feature-enhanced Siamese tracker (SiamMAF) for TIR tracking. We design a feature-enhanced module (FEM) based on complementarity, which can highlight the key semantic information of the target and preserve the detailed information of objects. Furthermore, we introduce a response fusion module (RFM) that can adaptively fuse multiple response maps. Extensive experimental results on two challenging benchmarks show that SiamMAF outperforms many existing state-of-the-art TIR trackers and runs at a steady 31FPS.