IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (Jan 2024)

Adaptive Spatial Regularization Correlation Filters for UAV Tracking

  • Yulin Cao,
  • Shihao Dong,
  • Jiawei Zhang,
  • Han Xu,
  • Yan Zhang,
  • Yuhui Zheng

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2024.3380574
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17
pp. 7867 – 7877

Abstract

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As a tool for near-earth remote sensing, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be used to acquire images and data of the earth's surface. This provides a powerful support for Earth observation and resource management. Object tracking in UAV videos has been a topic of much interest in recent years. A large number of algorithms have been proposed. Among these algorithms, deep learning has achieved a high accuracy rate. However, it is difficult to carry hardware devices for UAV, which makes it difficult to be practically applied. The correlation filter does not require a graphic processing unit to accelerate the computation, but it uses only manual features, which makes it difficult to achieve satisfactory performance. In order to solve the above problems, we proposed adaptive spatial regularization correlation filters, called DTSRT. Specifically, we first introduce deep features in the correlation filter instead of the original manual features, which can greatly improve the discriminative ability of the model. At the same time, in order to prevent affecting the real-time performance of the algorithm, we use histogram of oriented gradients features to determine the target scale and deep features to determine the target location. In addition, considering the large inter-frame distance between targets in UAV videos, we use a saliency detection method to dynamically generate spatially constrained templates. The proposed DTSRT outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms with area under curve of 0.481, 0.431, and 0.474 on UAV123@10FPS, UAVDT, and DTB70 datasets, respectively.

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