A lightweight target tracking algorithm based on online correction for meta-learning

The traditional Siamese network based object tracking algorithms suffer from high computational complexity, making them difficult to run on embedded devices. Moreover, when faced with long-term tracking tasks, their success rates significantly decline. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight long-term object tracking algorithm called Meta-Master-based Ghost Fast Tracking (MGTtracker),which based on meta-learning. This algorithm integrates the Ghost mechanism to create a lightweight backbone network called G-ResNet, which accurately extracts target features while operating quickly. We design a tiny adaptive weighted fusion feature pyramid network (TiFPN) to enhance feature information fusion and mitigate interference from similar objects. We introduce a lightweight region regression network, the Ghost Decouple Net (GDNet) for target position prediction. Finally, we propose a meta-learning-based online template correction mechanism called Meta-Master to overcome error accumulation in long-term tracking tasks and the difficulty of reacquiring targets after loss. We evaluate the algorithm on public datasets OTB100, VOT2020, VOT2018LT, and LaSOT and deploy it for performance testing on Jetson Xavier NX. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm. Compared to existing classic object tracking algorithms, our approach achieves a faster running speed of 25 FPS on NX, and real-time correction enhances the algorithm’s robustness. Although similar in accuracy and EAO metrics, our algorithm outperforms similar algorithms in speed and effectively addresses the issues of significant cumulative errors and easy target loss during tracking. Code is released at https://github.com/ygh96521/MGTtracker.git.