Visual Tracking With Convolutional Random Vector Functional Link Network

Deep neural network-based methods have recently achieved excellent performance in visual tracking task. As very few training samples are available in visual tracking task, those approaches rely heavily on extremely large auxiliary dataset such as ImageNet to pretrain the model. In order to address the discrepancy between the source domain (the auxiliary data) and the target domain (the object being tracked), they need to be finetuned during the tracking process. However, those methods suffer from sensitivity to the hyper-parameters such as learning rate, maximum number of epochs, size of mini-batch, and so on. Thus, it is worthy to investigate whether pretraining and fine tuning through conventional back-prop is essential for visual tracking. In this paper, we shed light on this line of research by proposing convolutional random vector functional link (CRVFL) neural network, which can be regarded as a marriage of the convolutional neural network and random vector functional link network, to simplify the visual tracking system. The parameters in the convolutional layer are randomly initialized and kept fixed. Only the parameters in the fully connected layer need to be learned. We further propose an elegant approach to update the tracker. In the widely used visual tracking benchmark, without any auxiliary data, a single CRVFL model achieves 79.0% with a threshold of 20 pixels for the precision plot. Moreover, an ensemble of CRVFL yields comparatively the best result of 86.3%.

I. Introduction

As a fundamental computer vision task, visual tracking has many applications such as surveillance, human computer interaction, medical imaging, and so on. Despite significant progress made recently, visual tracking is still challenging due to factors such as significant background/object variations, deformation, fast motion, and so on.