Towards accurate estimation for visual object tracking with multi-hierarchy feature aggregation

Abstract Many methods achieve the visual object tracking task with deep learning technologies. As the deep features of different levels contain various semantic information and functions, this paper presents a multi-hierarchy feature aggregation approach to tackle the specific issues in the tracking task, which consists of two aspects. On one hand, this paper integrates the features captured by the offline and online classifiers at the score level, which constructs complementary roles of these classifiers to enhance the stability of classification. Besides, the proposed offline classifier is continuously optimized with different levels of features to reinforce classification constraints. On the other hand, we design a butterfly attention module to promote the capacity of multi-hierarchy feature aggregation in the regression network, which aims to fuse and strengthen the multi-scale features by attending to their spatial information. It can capture more spatial contexts by utilizing the self-attention mechanism during the fusion procedure, and preserve the hierarchy of the features during the strengthening process. Extensive experiments on four public datasets, i.e., VOT2018, OTB100, NFS and LaSOT datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.