Branch-Activated Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Tracking

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied in state-of-the-art visual tracking tasks to represent the target. However, most existing algorithms treat visual tracking as an object-specific task. Therefore, the model needs to be retrained for different test video sequences. We propose a branch-activated multi-domain convolutional neural network (BAMDCNN). In contrast to most existing trackers based on CNNs which require frequent online training, BAMDCNN only needs offline training and online fine-tuning. Specifically, BAMDCNN exploits category-specific features that are more robust against variations. To allow for learning category-specific information, we introduce a group algorithm and a branch activation method. Experimental results on challenging benchmark show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. What’s more, compared with CNN based trackers, BAMDCNN increases tracking speed.