Feature Distilled Tracking

Abstract

Feature extraction and representation is one of the most important components for fast, accurate, and robust visual tracking. Very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide effective tools for feature extraction with good generalization ability. However, extracting features using very deep CNN models needs high performance hardware due to its large computation complexity, which prohibits its extensions in real-time applications. To alleviate this problem, we aim at obtaining small and fast-to-execute shallow models based on model compression for visual tracking. Specifically, we propose a small feature distilled network (FDN) for tracking by imitating the intermediate representations of a much deeper network. The FDN extracts rich visual features with higher speed than the original deeper network. To further speed-up, we introduce a shift-and-stitch method to reduce the arithmetic operations, while preserving the spatial resolution of the distilled feature maps unchanged. Finally, a scale adaptive discriminative correlation filter is learned on the distilled feature for visual tracking to handle scale variation of the target. Comprehensive experimental results on object tracking benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach achieves 5x speed-up with competitive performance to the state-of-the-art deep trackers.