Visual Tracking Based on Complementary Learners with Distractor Handling

The representation of the object is an important factor in building a robust visual object tracking algorithm. To resolve this problem, complementary learners that use color histogram- and correlation filter-based representation to represent the target object can be used since they each have advantages that can be exploited to compensate the other’s drawback in visual tracking. Further, a tracking algorithm can fail because of the distractor, even when complementary learners have been implemented for the target object representation. In this study, we show that, in order to handle the distractor, first the distractor must be detected by learning the responses from the color-histogram- and correlation-filter-based representation. Then, to determine the target location, we can decide whether the responses from each representation should be merged or only the response from the correlation filter should be used. This decision depends on the result obtained from the distractor detection process. Experiments were performed on the widely used VOT2014 and VOT2015 benchmark datasets. It was verified that our proposed method performs favorably as compared with several state-of-the-art visual tracking algorithms.