RAMCT: Novel Region-adaptive Multi-channel Tracker with Iterative Tikhonov Regularization for Thermal Infrared Tracking

Abstract: Correlation filter (CF)-based trackers have gained significant attention for their computational efficiency in thermal infrared (TIR) target tracking. However, ex-isting methods struggle with challenges such as low-resolution imagery, occlu-sion, background clutter, and target deformation, which severely impact tracking performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose RAMCT, a region-adaptive sparse correlation filter tracker that integrates multi-channel feature opti-mization with an adaptive regularization strategy. Firstly, we refine the CF learn-ing process by introducing a spatially adaptive binary mask, which enforces spar-sity in the target region while dynamically suppressing background interference. Secondly, we introduce generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) and propose a novel GSVD-based region-adaptive iterative Tikhonov regularization method. This enables flexible and robust optimization across multiple feature channels, improving resilience to occlusion and background variations. Thirdly, we propose an online optimization strategy with dynamic discrepancy-based pa-rameter adjustment. This mechanism facilitates real time adaptation to target and background variations, thereby improving tracking accuracy and robustness. Ex-tensive experiments on LSOTB-TIR, PTB-TIR, VOT-TIR2015, and VOT-TIR2017 benchmarks demonstrate that RAMCT outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers in terms of accuracy and robustness.