Tackling Occlusion in Siamese Tracking with Structured Dropouts

Occlusion is one of the most difficult challenges in object tracking to model. This is because unlike other challenges, where data augmentation can be of help, occlusion is hard to simulate as the occluding object can be anything in any shape. In this paper, we propose a simple solution to simulate the effects of occlusion in the latent space. Specifically, we present structured dropout to mimick the change in latent codes under occlusion. We present three forms of dropout (channel dropout, segment dropout and slice dropout) with the various forms of occlusion in mind. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the dropouts are incorporated into two modern Siamese trackers (SiamFC and SiamRPN++). The outputs from multiple dropouts are combined using an encoder network to obtain the final prediction. Experiments on several tracking benchmarks show the benefits of structured dropouts, while due to their simplicity requiring only small changes to the existing tracker models.