Effective Local and Global Search for Fast Long-Term Tracking

Compared with short-term tracking, long-term tracking remains a challenging task that usually requires the tracking algorithm to track targets within a local region and re-detect targets over the entire image. However, few works have been done and their performances have also been limited. In this paper, we present a novel robust and real-time long-term tracking framework based on the proposed local search module and re-detection module. The local search module consists of an effective bounding box regressor to generate a series of candidate proposals and a target verifier to infer the optimal candidate with its confidence score. For local search, we design a long short-term updated scheme to improve the target verifier. The verification capability of the tracker can be improved by using several templates updated at different times. Based on the verification scores, our tracker determines whether the tracked object is present or absent and then chooses the tracking strategies of local or global search, respectively, in the next frame. For global re-detection, we develop a novel re-detection module that can estimate the target position and target size for a given base tracker. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate that this module can be flexibly integrated into many other tracking algorithms for long-term tracking and that it can improve long-term tracking performance effectively. Numerous experiments and discussions are conducted on several popular tracking datasets, including VOT, OxUvA, TLP, and LaSOT. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker achieves satisfactory performance with a real-time speed. Code is available at https://github.com/difhnp/ELGLT.