SOCF: A correlation filter for real-time UAV tracking based on spatial disturbance suppression and object saliency-aware

The discriminative correlation filter (DCF) is commonly used in aerial object tracking due to its high tracking accuracy and computing speed. However, when similar object disturbances emerge in the background, the response map will generate sub-peaks, which may eventually lead to tracking failure. Meanwhile, the lack of attention to the tracked object can also cause tracking performance degradation. To these concerns, this paper proposes a novel correlation filter algorithm for real-time aerial tracking based on spatial disturbance suppression and object saliency-aware, i.e., SOCF. Firstly, this paper designs a novel spatial disturbance suppression strategy. Using the temporal information in the historical response maps, we construct a context response map, deviating it from the current response map to detect disturbance information in the background. Then, construct a spatial interference map, divide it into n×n non-overlapping regions, and suppress the negative samples in the disturbance region within the main regression. Furthermore, an object saliency-aware strategy is proposed, using a saliency detection algorithm to calculate the object-aware mask and multiplying it with the detection filter to obtain the object-aware filter. By constructing the object-aware regularization in the training phase, the trained detection filter focuses more on the object itself and can effectively separate the object from the background. Extensive experiments on four widely used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets demonstrate that the proposed SOCF tracker achieves high tracking performance. Meanwhile, our tracker can maintain real-time aerial tracking at 48 FPS on a single CPU.