Recently, the correlation filter based trackers have achieved very good tracking performance. However, due to the boundary effects of the circulant matrix and the usage of cosine window, the lack of effective negative samples becomes a challenging problem for the correlation filter based trackers. This problem may cause overfitting so that these trackers become very sensitive to deformation and occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel object tracker (i.e., STAPLE_HNM), which can effectively select hard negative samples and assign adaptive weights to these samples to train the correlation filter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed STAPLE_HNM tracker effectively improves the performance of the baseline STAPLE_CA tracker on the OTB-50 and OTB-100 datasets. Moreover, the proposed STAPLE_HNM tracker also achieves superior performance among several state-of-the-art trackers.

Color and intensity are two important components in an image. Usually, groups of image pixels, which are similar in color or intensity, are an informative representation for an object. They are therefore particularly suitable for computer vision tasks, such as saliency detection and object proposal generation. However, image pixels, which share a similar real-world color, may be quite different since colors are often distorted by intensity. In this paper, we reinvestigate the affinity matrices originally used in image segmentation methods based on spectral clustering. A new affinity matrix, which is robust to color distortions, is formulated for object discovery. Moreover, a cohesion measurement (CM) for object regions is also derived based on the formulated affinity matrix. Based on the new CM, a novel object discovery method is proposed to discover objects latent in an image by utilizing the eigenvectors of the affinity matrix. Then we apply the proposed method to both saliency detection and object proposal generation. Experimental results on several evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CM-based method has achieved promising performance for these two tasks.

Despite recent progress, computational visual aesthetic is still challenging. Image cropping, which refers to the removal of unwanted scene areas, is an important step to improve the aesthetic quality of an image. However, it is challenging to evaluate whether cropping leads to aesthetically pleasing results because the assessment is typically subjective. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded cropping regression (CCR) method to perform image cropping by learning the knowledge from professional photographers. The proposed CCR method improves the convergence speed of the cascaded method, which directly uses random-ferns regressors. In addition, a two-step learning strategy is proposed and used in the CCR method to address the problem of lacking labelled cropping data. Specifically, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is first trained on large-scale visual aesthetic datasets. The deep CNN model is then designed to extract features from several image cropping datasets, upon which the cropping bounding boxes are predicted by the proposed CCR method. Experimental results on public image cropping datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art image cropping methods.