Unifying Spatial and Attribute Selection for Distracter-Resilient Tracking

Visual distracters are detrimental and generally very difficult to handle in target tracking, because they generate false positive candidates for target matching. The resilience of region-based matching to the distracters depends not only on the matching metric, but also on the characteristics of the target region to be matched. The two tasks, i.e., learning the best metric and selecting the distracter-resilient target regions, actually correspond to the attribute selection and spatial selection processes in the human visual perception. This paper presents an initial attempt to unify the modeling of these two tasks for an effective solution, based on the introduction of a new quantity called Soft Visual Margin. As a function of both matching metric and spatial location, it measures the discrimination between the target and its spatial distracters, and characterizes the reliability of matching. Different from other formulations of margin, this new quantity is analytical and is insensitive to noisy data. This paper presents a novel method to jointly determine the best spatial location and the optimal metric. Based on that, a solid distracter-resilient region tracker is designed, and its effectiveness is validated and demonstrated through extensive experiments.