Visual tracking via sparse representation with reliable structure constraint

In this letter, we present a novel visual tracking algorithm based on sparse representation. In contrast to just use the target templates and the trivial templates to sparsely represent the target, we propose to further constrain the model with a set of discriminative weight maps. These weight maps contain the reliable structures of the target object. They help the model penalize the trivial template coefficients depending on the reliable structures of the target object. Then, the target object can be well represented by a sparse set of target templates together with a sparse set of target weight maps. We propose a unified objective function to integrate these two sparse representation problems together. This optimization problem can be well solved by the proposed iteration manner and a customized accelerated proximal gradient method. Furthermore, a novel weight map constructing method is proposed based on consistent motion property and forward-backward errors. Plenty of qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of tracking scenarios.