Multi-scale underwater object tracking by adaptive feature fusion

Different from object tacking on the ground, underwater object tracking is challenging due to the image attenuation and distortion. Also, challenges are increased by the high-freedom motion of targets under water. Target rotation, scale change, and occlusion significantly degenerate the performance of various tracking methods. Aiming to solve above problems, this paper proposes a multi-scale underwater object tracking method by adaptive feature fusion. The gray, HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) and CN (Color Names) features are adaptively fused in the background-aware correlation filter (BACF) model. Moreover, a novel scale estimation method and a high-confidence model update strategy are proposed to comprehensively solve the problems caused by the scale changes and background noise influences. Experimental results demonstrate that the success ratio of the AUC criterion is 64.1% that is better than classic BACF and other methods, especially in challenging conditions.