Object tracking using Hyperspectral Images (HSIs) obtains satisfactory result in distinguishing objects with similar colors. Yet, the tracking algorithm tends to fail when the target undergoes deformation. In this paper, a SiamRPN based hyperspectral tracker is proposed to deal with this problem. Firstly, a band selection method based on a genetic optimization method is designed for rapidly reducing the redundancy of information in HSIs. Specifically, three bands with highest joint entropy are selected. To solve the problem that the information of the template in the SiamRPN model decays over time, an update network is trained on the dataset from general objective tracking benchmark, which can obtain effective cumulative templates. The use of cumulative templates with spectral information makes it easier to track the deformed target. In addition, transfer learning of the pre-trained SiamRPN is designed to obtain a better model for HSIs. The experimental results show that the proposed tracker can obtain good tracking results over the entire public dataset, and that it is better than the other popular trackers when the target’s deformation is qualitatively and quantitatively compared, achieving an overall success rate of 57.5% and a deformation challenge success rate of 70.8%.

Hyperspectral images provide a wealth of spectral and spatial information, offering significant advantages for the purpose of tracking objects. However, Siamese trackers are unable to fully exploit spectral features due to the limited number of hyperspectral videos. The high-dimensional nature of hyperspectral images complicates the model training process. In order to address the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a hyperspectral object tracking (HOT) algorithm callled SiamPKHT, which leverages the SiamCAR model by incorporating pyramid shuffle attention (PSA) and knowledge distillation (KD). First, the PSA module employs pyramid convolutions to extract multiscale features. In addition, shuffle attention is adopted to capture relationships between different channels and spatial positions, thereby obtaining good features with a stronger classification performance. Second, KD is introduced under the guidance of a pre-trained RGB tracking model, which deals with the problem of overfitting in HOT. Experiments using HOT2022 data indicate that the designed SiamPKHT achieves better performance compared to the baseline method (SiamCAR) and other state-of-the-art HOT algorithms. It also achieves real-time requirements at 43 frames per second.