Blending of Learning-based Tracking and Object Detection for Monocular Camera-based Target Following

Abstract: Deep learning has recently started being applied to visual tracking of generic objects in video streams. For the purposes of robotics applications, it is very important for a target tracker to recover its track if it is lost due to heavy or prolonged occlusions or motion blur of the target. We present a real-time approach which fuses a generic target tracker and object detection module with a target re-identification module. Our work focuses on improving the performance of Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network-based object trackers in cases where the object of interest belongs to the category of \emph{familiar} objects. Our proposed approach is sufficiently lightweight to track objects at 85-90 FPS while attaining competitive results on challenging benchmarks.