Thermal Infrared Tracking using Multi-stages Deep Features Fusion

Thermal infrared (TIR) tracking can be utilized to track the target in the images generated by thermal infrared sensors due to the weak influence by illumination changes. However, there are still some challenges to do thermal infrared tracking when suffering drastic appearance variation, heavy occlusion and background clutters. The absence of RGB patterns and low resolution also constrain the tracking performance in complex scenarios. The deep convolutional features are widely utilized to solve visual tracking problems which successfully extracted the spatial and semantic information though object representation. Motivated by these methods, we firstly propose to combine multi-stages cascaded Siamese networks to achieve deep features fusion in three stages, then achieve the tracking procedure by candidates matching strategy. The final results are obtained by non-maximum suppression and scale penalty. The proposed method can inherit the advantages by fusing multi-stages deep features and achieve end-to-end learning simultaneously. The experiments are evaluated with state-of-the-art methods on VOT-TIR2016 benchmark and attributes based comparison. The tracking results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the compared methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.