REAL-TIME TRACKING IN SATELLITE VIDEOS VIA JOINT DISCRIMINATION AND POSE ESTIMATION

Abstract. Object tracking has gained much attention in the field of computer vision and intelligent traffic analysis. Satellite videos are more suitable for long-distance tracking comparing to the road traffic videos. However, most of the state-of-the-art methods produce poor results when applied to satellite videos, due to low resolution of the small target and interference from similar background in satellite videos. In this paper, we present an improved Discriminative Correlation Filter based approach specifically tailored for small objects tracking in satellite videos through applying spatial weight in the filter and estimating the pose by Kalman filter. First, a spatial mask is introduced to encourage the final filter to give different contributions depending on the spatial distance. Furthermore, Kalman filter is incorporated into the approach with the aim of predicting the position when the target run into the large area similar background region. Finally, an efficient strategy for combining the improved DCF tracker and pose estimation is proposed. Experimental results on three satellite videos describing the traffic conditions of three cities demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively track the targets even though the targets are similar to the background region in a period of time. Compare with other state-of-the-art methods, the final accuracies and speeds of our method achieve the best.