Abstract
In recent years, visual tracking is a challenging task in UAV applications. The standard correlation filter (CF) has been extensively applied for UAV object tracking. However, the CF-based tracker severely suffers from boundary effects and cannot effectively cope with object occlusion, which results in suboptimal performance. Besides, it is still a tough task to obtain an appearance model precisely with hand-crafted features. In this paper, a novel part-based tracker is proposed for the UAV. With successive cropping operations, the tracking object is separated into several parts. More specially, the backgroundaware correlation filters with different cropping matrices are applied. To estimate the translation and scale variation of the tracking object, a structured comparison, and a Bayesian inference approach are proposed, which jointly achieve a coarse-to-fine strategy. Moreover, an adaptive mechanism is used to update the local appearance model of each part with a Gaussian process regression method. To construct a better appearance model, features extracted from the convolutional neural network are utilized instead of hand-crafted features. Through extensive experiments, the proposed tracker reaches competitive performance on 123 challenging UAV image sequences and outperforms other 20 popular state-of-the-art visual trackers in terms of overall performance and different challenging attributes.