Remote sensing target tracking in satellite videos based on a variable-angle-adaptive Siamese network

Funding information National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: 61971006; Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipal, Grant/Award Number: 4192021 Abstract Remote sensing target tracking in satellite videos plays a key role in various fields. However, due to the complex backgrounds of satellite video sequences and many rotation changes of highly dynamic targets, typical target tracking methods for natural scenes cannot be used directly for such tasks, and their robustness and accuracy are difficult to guarantee. To address these problems, an algorithm is proposed for remote sensing target tracking in satellite videos based on a variable-angle-adaptive Siamese network (VAASN). Specifically, the method is based on the fully convolutional Siamese network (Siamese-FC). First, for the feature extraction stage, to reduce the impact of complex backgrounds, we present a new multifrequency feature representation method and introduce the octave convolution (OctConv) into the AlexNet architecture to adapt to the new feature representation. Then, for the tracking stage, to adapt to changes in target rotation, a variable-angle-adaptive module that uses a fast text detector with a single deep neural network (TextBoxes++) is introduced to extract angle information from the template frame and detection frames and performs angle consistency update operations on the detection frames. Finally, qualitative and quantitative experiments using satellite datasets show that the proposed method can improve tracking accuracy while achieving high efficiency.