In defense of color-based model-free tracking

In this paper, we address the problem of model-free online object tracking based on color representations. According to the findings of recent benchmark evaluations, such trackers often tend to drift towards regions which exhibit a similar appearance compared to the object of interest. To overcome this limitation, we propose an efficient discriminative object model which allows us to identify potentially distracting regions in advance. Furthermore, we exploit this knowledge to adapt the object representation beforehand so that distractors are suppressed and the risk of drifting is significantly reduced. We evaluate our approach on recent online tracking benchmark datasets demonstrating state-of-the-art results. In particular, our approach performs favorably both in terms of accuracy and robustness compared to recent tracking algorithms. Moreover, the proposed approach allows for an efficient implementation to enable online object tracking in real-time.