Exploiting rank-based filter pruning for real-time UAV tracking

Abstract

UAV tracking is an emerging task and has wide potential applications in such as agriculture, navigation, entertainment and public security. However, the limitations of computing resources, battery capacity, and maximum load of UAV hinder the deployment of DL-based tracking algorithms on UAV. In contrast to deep learning trackers, discriminative correlation filters (DCF)-based trackers stand out in the UAV tracking community because of their high efficiency. However, their precision is usually much lower than trackers based on deep learning. Model compression is a promising way to reduce the disparity (i.e., efficiency, precision) between DCF- and deep learning- based trackers, which has not caught much attention in the UAV tracking community. In this paper, We propose the P-SiamFC++ tracker, which is the first to use rank-based filter pruning to compress the SiamFC++ model, achieving a remarkable balance between efficiency and precision. Our method is general and could inspire additional research into UAV tracking with model compression in the future. Extensive experiments on four UAV benchmarks, including UAV123@10fps, DTB70, UAVDT and Vistrone2018, show that P-SiamFC++ tracker significantly outperforms state-of-the-art UAV tracking methods.