Remote Sensing Object Tracking With Deep Reinforcement Learning Under Occlusion

Object tracking is an important research direction of space Earth observation in the field of remote sensing. Although the existing correlation filter-based and deep learning (DL)-based object tracking algorithms have achieved great success, they are still unsatisfactory for the problem of object occlusion. The occlusion caused by the complex change in background, and the deviation of the tracking lens, causes object information to go missing, which leads to the omission of detection. Traditionally, most methods for object tracking under occlusion adopt a complex network model, which redetects the occluded object. To address this issue, we propose a novel object tracking approach. First, an action decision-occlusion handling network (AD-OHNet) based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is built to achieve low computational complexity for object tracking under occlusion. Second, the temporal and spatial context, the object appearance model, and the motion vector are adopted to provide the occlusion information, which drives actions in reinforcement learning under complete occlusion and contributes to improving the accuracy of tracking while maintaining speed. Finally, the proposed AD-OHNet is evaluated on three remote sensing video datasets of Bogota, Hong Kong, and San Diego taken from Jilin-1 commercial remote sensing satellites. The video datasets all shared problems of low spatial resolution, background clutter, and small objects. Experimental results on the three video datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed tracker.