Object Relocation Visual Tracking Based on Histogram Filter and Siamese Network in Intelligent Transportation

Target detection and tracking algorithms are one of the key technologies in the field of autonomous driving in intelligent transportation, providing important sensing capabilities for vehicle localization and path planning. Siamese network-based trackers formulate the visual tracking mission as an image-matching process by regression and classification branches, which simplifies the network structure and improves the tracking accuracy. However, there remain many problems, as described below. (1) The lightweight neural networks decrease the feature representation ability. It is easy for the tracker to fail under the disturbing distractors (e.g., deformation and similar objects) or large changes in the viewing angle. (2) The tracker cannot adapt to variations of the object. (3) The tracker cannot reposition the object that has failed to track. To address these issues, we first propose a novel match filter arbiter based on the Euclidean distance histogram between the centers of multiple candidate objects to automatically determine whether the tracker fails. Secondly, the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm is introduced to select the winners from the dynamic template set through the backtracking process, and object relocation is achieved by comparing the Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation between the template and the winners. The experiments show that our method obtains better performance on several tracking benchmarks, i.e., OTB100, VOT2018, GOT-10k, and LaSOT, compared with state-of-the-art methods.