Infrared Small Target Tracking Based on Target Spatial Distribution With Improved Kernelized Correlation Filtering

Abstract The application of correlation filtering in infrared small target tracking has been a mature research field. Traditionalcorrelation filtering is to describe the target features by using a single feature, which can not solve the problem of target occlusion. Because of the fast moving speed and lack of re-detection mechanism, the target tracking will produce offset, which leads to the performance of the tracker to decline. In view of the above problems, a new multi feature re detection framework is proposed for long-term tracking of small targets. The feature selects multi feature weighting function, considers the importance of intensity feature to infrared target and different regions, calculates the gray distribution weighting function of the target, and combines the weighting function into the correlation filter. Before updating the template, to verify the reliability of target detection, the average peak correlation energy is used as the confidence of candidate region. When the target is completely occluded, the prediction result of Kalman filter is used as the optimal estimation of target position in the next frame. A large number of experimental results on different video sequences show that the tracking accuracy of this method is greatly improved compared with the baseline method.