In recent visual tracking research, correlation filter (CF) based trackers become popular because of their high speed and considerable accuracy. Previous methods mainly work on the extension of features and the solution of the boundary effect to learn a better correlation filter. However, the related studies are insufficient. By exploring the potential of trackers in these two aspects, a novel adaptive padding correlation filter (APCF) with feature group fusion is proposed for robust visual tracking in this paper based on the popular context-aware tracking framework. In the tracker, three feature groups are fused by use of the weighted sum of the normalized response maps, to alleviate the risk of drift caused by the extreme change of single feature. Moreover, to improve the adaptive ability of padding for the filter training of different object shapes, the best padding is selected from the preset pool according to tracking precision over the whole video, where tracking precision is predicted according to the prediction model trained by use of the sequence features of the first several frames. The sequence features include three traditional features and eight newly constructed features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed tracker is superior to most state-of-the-art correlation filter based trackers and has a stable improvement compared to the basic trackers.

As a typical non-Gaussian vector variable, a neutral vector variable contains nonnegative elements only, and its l₁-norm equals one. In addition, its neutral properties make it significantly different from the commonly studied vector variables (e.g., the Gaussian vector variables). Due to the aforementioned properties, the conventionally applied linear transformation approaches [e.g., principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA)] are not suitable for neutral vector variables, as PCA cannot transform a neutral vector variable, which is highly negatively correlated, into a set of mutually independent scalar variables and ICA cannot preserve the bounded property after transformation. In recent work, we proposed an efficient nonlinear transformation approach, i.e., the parallel nonlinear transformation (PNT), for decorrelating neutral vector variables. In this article, we extensively compare PNT with PCA and ICA through both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations. The results of our investigations demonstrate the superiority of PNT for decorrelating the neutral vector variables.

Recently, the correlation filter (CF) has been catching significant attention in visual tracking for its high efficiency in most state-of-the-art algorithms. However, the tracker easily fails when facing the distractions caused by background clutter, occlusion, and other challenging situations. These distractions commonly exist in the visual object tracking of real applications. Keep tracking under these circumstances is the bottleneck in the field. To improve tracking performance under complex interference, a combination of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression and contextual information is introduced to the CF framework through the learning stage in this article to ignore these distractions. Moreover, an elastic net regression is proposed to regroup the features, and an adaptive scale method is implemented to deal with the scale changes during tracking. Theoretical analysis and exhaustive experimental analysis show that the proposed peak strength context-aware (PSCA) CF significantly improves the kernelized CF (KCF) and achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art trackers.