Exploiting Probabilistic Siamese Visual Tracking with a Conditional Variational Autoencoder

摘要

Visual tracking is a fundamental capability for robots tasked with humans and environment interaction. However, state-of-the-art visual tracking methods are still prone to failures and are imprecise when applied to challenging stereos, and their results are generally confidence agonistic. These methods depend on an embedded deep learning model to provide deterministic features or regression maps. A deterministic output with low confidence can result in disastrous consequences and lacks evidence needed for subsequent operations. Moreover, training data ambiguities or noise in the observations (so-called data uncertainty) can also lead to inherent uncertainty. In this paper, we focus on exploiting probabilistic Siamese visual tracking with a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). First, we build a bridge between the Siamese architecture and the CVAE and propose a novel Bayesian visual tracking method. Second, the proposed method generates a complete probability distribution that enables the production of multiple plausible tracking outputs. Third, CVAE conditioned by ground truth data encodes a low-dimensional latent space and conducts noise-injection training to prevent overfitting. Our proposed tracking method outperformed the state-of-the-art trackers on the VOT2016, VOT2018 and TColor-128 datasets.