  The tracking-by-detection framework receives growing attentions through the
integration with the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Existing
tracking-by-detection based methods, however, fail to track objects with severe
appearance variations. This is because the traditional convolutional operation
is performed on fixed grids, and thus may not be able to find the correct
response while the object is changing pose or under varying environmental
conditions. In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution layer to enrich
the target appearance representations in the tracking-by-detection framework.
We aim to capture the target appearance variations via deformable convolution,
which adaptively enhances its original features. In addition, we also propose a
gated fusion scheme to control how the variations captured by the deformable
convolution affect the original appearance. The enriched feature representation
through deformable convolution facilitates the discrimination of the CNN
classifier on the target object and background. Extensive experiments on the
standard benchmarks show that the proposed tracker performs favorably against
state-of-the-art methods.
