Infrared Small Target Tracking via Gaussian Curvature-Based Compressive Convolution Feature Extraction

The precision of infrared (IR) small target tracking is seriously limited due to lack of texture information and interference of background clutter. The key issue of robust tracking is to exploit generic feature representations of IR small targets under different types of background. In this letter, we present a new IR small target tracking method via compressive convolution feature (CCF) extraction. First, a Gaussian curvature-based feature map is calculated to suppress clutters so that the contrast between target and background can be obviously improved. Then, a three-layer compressive convolutional network, which consists of a simple layer, a compressive layer, and a complex layer, is designed to represent each candidate target by a CCF vector. Based on the proposed mechanism of feature extraction, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier with continuous probabilistic output is trained to compute the likelihood probability of each candidate. Finally, the long-term tracking for IR small target is implemented under the framework of the inverse sparse representation-based particle filter. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments based on real IR sequences verify that our method can achieve more satisfactory performances in terms of precision and robustness compared with other typical visual trackers.