Robust Visual Tracking Via An Imbalance-Elimination Mechanism

The competitive performances in visual tracking are achieved mostly by tracking-by-detection based approaches, whose accuracy highly relies on a binary classifier that distinguishes targets from distractors in a set of candidates. However, severe class imbalance, with few positives (e.g., targets) relative to negatives (e.g., backgrounds), leads to degrade accuracy of classification or increase bias of tracking. In this paper, we propose an imbalance-elimination mechanism, which adopts a multi-class paradigm and utilizes a novel candidate generation strategy. Specifically, our multi-class model assigns samples into one positive class and four proposed negative classes, naturally alleviating class imbalance. We define negative classes by introducing proportions of targets in samples, which values explicitly reveal relative scales between targets and backgrounds. Further-more, during candidate generation, we exploit such scale-aware negative patterns to help adjust searching areas of candidates to incorporate larger target proportions, thus more accurate target candidates are obtained and more positive samples are included to ease class imbalance simultaneously. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that our tracker achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-art approaches, and offers robust discrimination of positive targets and negative patterns.