International Journal of Emerging Research in Engineering, Science, and Management
Vol. 5, Issue 2, pp. 23-35, Apr-Jun 2026.
https://doi.org/10.58482/ijeresm.v5i2.2

Received: 21 Jan 2026 | Revised: 10 Apr 2026 | Accepted: 21 Apr 2026 | Published: 28 Apr 2026

Feature Fusion Strategy Based on Concatenation of Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Pretrained CNN Features for Visual Object Tracking

1Villari Sreenatha Sarma

2P.M. Ashok Kumar

3Vadamala Purandhar Reddy

1,2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India.

1,3Audisankara College of Engineering & Technology, Gudur, Andhra Pradesh, India.

Abstract: This paper presents a hybrid feature fusion approach for visual object tracking that combines hand-crafted gradient-based descriptors with semantic representations extracted from a pretrained convolutional neural network. The proposed tracker integrates Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features with ResNet-50-based deep features within a correlation filter framework to improve robustness against appearance variations, occlusion, and illumination changes. A concatenation-based fusion strategy with adaptive confidence-driven weighting is incorporated to dynamically balance the contribution of handcrafted and deep features during tracking. The architecture employs parallel feature extraction branches and multi-scale feature integration to enhance localization performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental evaluation on standard benchmark datasets, including OTB-2015 and related tracking sequences, demonstrates that the proposed fusion strategy provides improved performance compared with individual feature-based tracking approaches and achieves competitive results relative to baseline correlation-filter trackers under challenging conditions. The study also outlines potential directions for further enhancement through online adaptation and attention-based feature fusion strategies.

Keywords: Visual Object Tracking, Feature Fusion, Histogram of Oriented Gradients, Correlation Filter Tracking, Adaptive Feature Weighting.

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