Real-time object tracking via least squares transformation in spatial and Fourier domains for unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of real-time object tracking for unmanned aerial vehicles. We consider the task of object tracking as a classification problem. Training a good classifier always needs a huge number of samples, which is always time-consuming and not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we transform the large-scale least-squares problem in the spatial domain to a series of small-scale least-squares problems with constraints in the Fourier domain using the correlation filter technique. Then, this problem is efficiently solved by two stages. In the first stage, a fast method based on recursive least squares is used to solve the correlation filter problem without constraints in the Fourier domain. In the second stage, a weight matrix is constructed to prune the solution attained in the first stage to approach the constraints in the spatial domain. Then, the pruned classifier is used for tracking. To evaluate proposed tracker’s performance, comprehensive experiments are conducted on challenging aerial sequences in the UAV123 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art tracking performance in aerial sequences and operates at a mean speed of beyond 40 frames/s. For further analysis of proposed tracker’s robustness, extensive experiments are also performed on recent benchmarks OTB50, OTB100, and VOT2016. Keywords: Correlation filter, Discrete Fourier transform, Least squares, Object tracking, Unmanned aerial vehicle