Visual Tracking via Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract Visual tracking has achieved great progress due to numerous different algorithms. However, deep trackers based on classification or Siamese network still have their specific limitations. In this work, we show how to teach machines to track a generic object in videos like humans, who can use a few search steps to perform tracking. By constructing a Markov decision process in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), our agents can learn to determine hierarchical decisions on tracking mode and motion estimation. To be specific, our Hierarchical DRL framework is composed of a Siamese-based observation network which models the motion information of an arbitrary target, a policy network for mode switch and an actor-critic network for box regression. This tracking strategy is more in line with human behavior paradigm, and is effective and efficient to cope with fast motion, background clutter and large deformations. Extensive experiments on the GOT-10k, OTB-100, UAV-123, VOT and LaSOT tracking benchmarks, demonstrate that the proposed tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance while running in real-time.