DSiamMFT: An RGB-T fusion tracking method via dynamic Siamese networks using multi-layer feature fusion

The task of object tracking is very important since its various applications. However, most object tracking methods are based on visible images, which may fail when visible images are unreliable, for example when the illumination conditions are poor. To address this issue, in this paper a fusion tracking method which combines information from RGB and thermal infrared images (RGB-T) is presented based on the fact that infrared images reveal thermal radiation of objects thus providing complementary features. Particularly, a fusion tracking method based on dynamic Siamese networks with multi-layer fusion, termed as DSiamMFT, is proposed. Visible and infrared images are firstly processed by two dynamic Siamese Networks, namely visible and infrared network, respectively. Then, multi-layer feature fusion is performed to adaptively integrate multi-level deep features between visible and infrared networks. Response maps produced from different fused layer features are then combined through an elementwise fusion approach to produce the final response map, based on which the target can be located. Extensive experiments on large datasets with various challenging scenarios have been conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed method shows very competitive performance against the-state-of-art RGB-T trackers. The proposed approach also improves tracking performance significantly compared to methods based on images of single modality.