Tracking low resolution objects by metric preservation

Tracking low resolution (LR) targets is a practical yet quite challenging problem in real applications. The loss of discriminative details in the visual appearance of the L-R targets confronts most existing visual tracking methods. Although the resolution of the LR video inputs may be enhanced by super resolution (SR) techniques, the large computational cost for high-quality SR does not make it an attractive option. This paper presents a novel solution to track LR targets without performing explicit SR. This new approach is based on discriminative metric preservation that preserves the structure in the high resolution feature space for LR matching. In addition, we integrate metric preservation with differential tracking to derive a closed-form solution to motion estimation for LR video. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.