Visual object tracking with online sample selection via lasso regularization

In the past years, discriminative methods are popular in visual tracking. The main idea of the discriminative method is to learn a classifier to distinguish the target from the background. The key step is the update of the classifier. Usually, the tracked results are chosen as the positive samples to update the classifier, which results in the failure of the updating of the classifier when the tracked results are not accurate. After that the tracker will drift away from the target. Additionally, a large number of training samples would hinder the online updating of the classifier without an appropriate sample selection strategy. To address the drift problem, we propose a score function to predict the optimal candidate directly instead of learning a classifier. Furthermore, to solve the problem of a large number of training samples, we design a sparsity-constrained sample selection strategy to choose some representative support samples from the large number of training samples on the updating stage. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, we implement experiments on the object tracking benchmark and 12 challenging sequences. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach achieves promising performance.