Robust feature learning for online discriminative tracking without large-scale pre-training

Owing to the inherent lack of training data in visual tracking, recent work in deep learning-based trackers has focused on learning a generic representation offline from large-scale training data and transferring the pre-trained feature representation to a tracking task. Offline pre-training is time-consuming, and the learned generic representation may be either less discriminative for tracking specific objects or overfitted to typical tracking datasets. In this paper, we propose an online discriminative tracking method based on robust feature learning without large-scale pre-training. Specifically, we first design a PCA filter bank-based convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to learn robust features online with a few positive and negative samples in the high-dimensional feature space. Then, we use a simple soft-thresholding method to produce sparse features that are more robust to target appearance variations. Moreover, we increase the reliability of our tracker using edge information generated from edge box proposals during the process of visual tracking. Finally, effective visual tracking results are achieved by systematically combining the tracking information and edge box-based scores in a particle filtering framework. Extensive results on the widely used online tracking benchmark (OTB-50) with 50 videos validate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed tracker without large-scale pre-training.