Real time robust L1 tracker using accelerated proximal gradient approach

Recently sparse representation has been applied to visual tracker by modeling the target appearance using a sparse approximation over a template set, which leads to the so-called L1 trackers as it needs to solve an ℓ₁ norm related minimization problem for many times. While these L1 trackers showed impressive tracking accuracies, they are very computationally demanding and the speed bottleneck is the solver to ℓ₁ norm minimizations. This paper aims at developing an L1 tracker that not only runs in real time but also enjoys better robustness than other L1 trackers. In our proposed L1 tracker, a new ℓ₁ norm related minimization model is proposed to improve the tracking accuracy by adding an ℓ₁ norm regularization on the coefficients associated with the trivial templates. Moreover, based on the accelerated proximal gradient approach, a very fast numerical solver is developed to solve the resulting ℓ₁ norm related minimization problem with guaranteed quadratic convergence. The great running time efficiency and tracking accuracy of the proposed tracker is validated with a comprehensive evaluation involving eight challenging sequences and five alternative state-of-the-art trackers.