  Discriminant Correlation Filters (DCF) based methods now become a kind of
dominant approach to online object tracking. The features used in these
methods, however, are either based on hand-crafted features like HoGs, or
convolutional features trained independently from other tasks like image
classification. In this work, we present an end-to-end lightweight network
architecture, namely DCFNet, to learn the convolutional features and perform
the correlation tracking process simultaneously. Specifically, we treat DCF as
a special correlation filter layer added in a Siamese network, and carefully
derive the backpropagation through it by defining the network output as the
probability heatmap of object location. Since the derivation is still carried
out in Fourier frequency domain, the efficiency property of DCF is preserved.
This enables our tracker to run at more than 60 FPS during test time, while
achieving a significant accuracy gain compared with KCF using HoGs. Extensive
evaluations on OTB-2013, OTB-2015, and VOT2015 benchmarks demonstrate that the
proposed DCFNet tracker is competitive with several state-of-the-art trackers,
while being more compact and much faster.
