Robust Visual Tracking Based on a Modified Flower Pollination Algorithm

In this study, a target tracking algorithm based on the flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is proposed. This method solves the problem of robust visual target tracking in different complex tracking scenes with the good global and local optimisation ability of the FPA. Meanwhile, with the aim of solving the problem of invalid background feature interference and the loss of effective features caused by the fixed scale of tracking frame in traditional tracking methods, a scale adaptive adjustment model of tracking frame is proposed. Considering that the FPA has good global and local optimization ability at simultaneously, the position update equation of the FPA is introduced as the main optimization method of target tracking. In addition, considering that the traditional FPA is similar to classical swarm intelligence algorithm (such as the particle swarm optimization algorithm), it also faces the problems of a high probability of falling into local extrema, a low efficiency of late convergence speed and a high probability of early maturity. Therefore, this work proposes the GTFPA, an advanced FPA based on the gravitational search algorithm (GSA) and mutation mechanism via a trigonometric function. We qualitatively, quantitatively and statistically compare the proposed method with other classical general tracking methods through two datasets, OTB2015 and VOT2018, which contain hundreds of video sequences and more than ten tracking scenes and can effectively test the success rate, accuracy and stability of the trackers. The results of a large number of tracking experiments in a variety of complex tracking scenarios prove that the proposed GTFPA tracker performs well with regards to efficiency, accuracy and robustness.