In recent years, the field of visual tracking has made significant progress with the application of large-scale training datasets. These datasets have supported the development of sophisticated algorithms, enhancing the accuracy and stability of visual object tracking. However, most research has primarily focused on favorable illumination circumstances, neglecting the challenges of tracking in low-ligh environments. In low-light scenes, lighting may change dramatically, targets may lack distinct texture features, and in some scenarios, targets may not be directly observable. These factors can lead to a severe decline in tracking performance. To address this issue, we introduce LLOT, a benchmark specifically designed for Low-Light Object Tracking. LLOT comprises 269 challenging sequences with a total of over 132K frames, each carefully annotated with bounding boxes. This specially designed dataset aims to promote innovation and advancement in object tracking techniques for low-light conditions, addressing challenges not adequately covered by existing benchmarks. To assess the performance of existing methods on LLOT, we conducted extensive tests on 39 state-of-the-art tracking algorithms. The results highlight a considerable gap in low-light tracking performance. In response, we propose H-DCPT, a novel tracker that incorporates historical and darkness clue prompts to set a stronger baseline. H-DCPT outperformed all 39 evaluated methods in our experiments, demonstrating significant improvements. We hope that our benchmark and H-DCPT will stimulate the development of novel and accurate methods for tracking objects in low-light conditions. The LLOT and code are available at https://github.com/OpenCodeGithub/H-DCPT.
Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT
The complementary benefits from visible and thermal infrared data are widely utilized in various computer vision task, such as visual tracking, semantic segmentation and object detection, but rarely explored in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). In this work, we contribute a large-scale Visible-Thermal video benchmark for MOT, called VT-MOT. VT-MOT has the following main advantages. 1) The data is large scale and high diversity. VT-MOT includes 582 video sequence pairs, 401k frame pairs from surveillance, drone, and handheld platforms. 2) The cross-modal alignment is highly accurate. We invite several professionals to perform both spatial and temporal alignment frame by frame. 3) The annotation is dense and high-quality. VT-MOT has 3.99 million annotation boxes annotated and double-checked by professionals, including heavy occlusion and object re-acquisition (object disappear and reappear) challenges. To provide a strong baseline, we design a simple yet effective tracking framework, which effectively fuses temporal information and complementary information of two modalities in a progressive manner, for robust visible-thermal MOT. A comprehensive experiment are conducted on VT-MOT and the results prove the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods. From the evaluation results and analysis, we specify several potential future directions for visible-thermal MOT. The project is released in https://github.com/wqw123wqw/PFTrack.
We introduce LocoTrack, a highly accurate and efficient model designed for the task of tracking any point (TAP) across video sequences. Previous approaches in this task often rely on local 2D correlation maps to establish correspondences from a point in the query image to a local region in the target image, which often struggle with homogeneous regions or repetitive features, leading to matching ambiguities. LocoTrack overcomes this challenge with a novel approach that utilizes all-pair correspondences across regions, i.e., local 4D correlation, to establish precise correspondences, with bidirectional correspondence and matching smoothness significantly enhancing robustness against ambiguities. We also incorporate a lightweight correlation encoder to enhance computational efficiency, and a compact Transformer architecture to integrate long-term temporal information. LocoTrack achieves unmatched accuracy on all TAP-Vid benchmarks and operates at a speed almost 6 times faster than the current state-of-the-art.
Most existing multi-object tracking methods typically learn visual tracking features via maximizing dis-similarities of different instances and minimizing similarities of the same instance. While such a feature learning scheme achieves promising performance, learning discriminative features solely based on visual information is challenging especially in case of environmental interference such as occlusion, blur and domain variance. In this work, we argue that multi-modal language-driven features provide complementary information to classical visual features, thereby aiding in improving the robustness to such environmental interference. To this end, we propose a new multi-object tracking framework, named LG-MOT, that explicitly leverages language information at different levels of granularity (scene-and instance-level) and combines it with standard visual features to obtain discriminative representations. To develop LG-MOT, we annotate existing MOT datasets with scene-and instance-level language descriptions. We then encode both instance-and scene-level language information into high-dimensional embeddings, which are utilized to guide the visual features during training. At inference, our LG-MOT uses the standard visual features without relying on annotated language descriptions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, MOT17, DanceTrack and SportsMOT, reveal the merits of the proposed contributions leading to state-of-the-art performance. On the DanceTrack test set, our LG-MOT achieves an absolute gain of 2.2\% in terms of target object association (IDF1 score), compared to the baseline using only visual features. Further, our LG-MOT exhibits strong cross-domain generalizability. The dataset and code will be available at ~\url{https://github.com/WesLee88524/LG-MOT}.
Multimodal sensing has proven valuable for visual tracking, as different sensor types offer unique strengths in handling one specific challenging scene where object appearance varies. While a generalist model capable of leveraging all modalities would be ideal, development is hindered by data sparsity, typically in practice, only one modality is available at a time. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure and achieve that knowledge gained from multimodal sensing -- such as identifying relevant features and regions -- is effectively shared, even when certain modalities are unavailable at inference. We venture with a simple assumption: similar samples across different modalities have more knowledge to share than otherwise. To implement this, we employ a ``weak" classifier tasked with distinguishing between modalities. More specifically, if the classifier ``fails" to accurately identify the modality of the given sample, this signals an opportunity for cross-modal knowledge sharing. Intuitively, knowledge transfer is facilitated whenever a sample from one modality is sufficiently close and aligned with another. Technically, we achieve this by routing samples from one modality to the expert of the others, within a mixture-of-experts framework designed for multimodal video object tracking. During the inference, the expert of the respective modality is chosen, which we show to benefit from the multimodal knowledge available during training, thanks to the proposed method. Through the exhaustive experiments that use only paired RGB-E, RGB-D, and RGB-T during training, we showcase the benefit of the proposed method for RGB-X tracker during inference, with an average +3\% precision improvement over the current SOTA. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/supertyd/XTrack/tree/main.
Masked image modeling (MIM) pre-training for large-scale vision transformers (ViTs) has enabled promising downstream performance on top of the learned self-supervised ViT features. In this paper, we question if the \textit{extremely simple} lightweight ViTs' fine-tuning performance can also benefit from this pre-training paradigm, which is considerably less studied yet in contrast to the well-established lightweight architecture design methodology. We use an observation-analysis-solution flow for our study. We first systematically observe different behaviors among the evaluated pre-training methods with respect to the downstream fine-tuning data scales. Furthermore, we analyze the layer representation similarities and attention maps across the obtained models, which clearly show the inferior learning of MIM pre-training on higher layers, leading to unsatisfactory transfer performance on data-insufficient downstream tasks. This finding is naturally a guide to designing our distillation strategies during pre-training to solve the above deterioration problem. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our pre-training with distillation on pure lightweight ViTs with vanilla/hierarchical design ($5.7M$/$6.5M$) can achieve $79.4\%$/$78.9\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. It also enables SOTA performance on the ADE20K segmentation task ($42.8\%$ mIoU) and LaSOT tracking task ($66.1\%$ AUC) in the lightweight regime. The latter even surpasses all the current SOTA lightweight CPU-realtime trackers.
Existing tracking methods mainly focus on learning better target representation or developing more robust prediction models to improve tracking performance. While tracking performance has significantly improved, the target loss issue occurs frequently due to tracking failures, complete occlusion, or out-of-view situations. However, considerably less attention is paid to the self-recovery issue of tracking methods, which is crucial for practical applications. To this end, we propose a recoverable tracking framework, RTracker, that uses a tree-structured memory to dynamically associate a tracker and a detector to enable self-recovery ability. Specifically, we propose a Positive-Negative Tree-structured memory to chronologically store and maintain positive and negative target samples. Upon the PN tree memory, we develop corresponding walking rules for determining the state of the target and define a set of control flows to unite the tracker and the detector in different tracking scenarios. Our core idea is to use the support samples of positive and negative target categories to establish a relative distance-based criterion for a reliable assessment of target loss. The favorable performance in comparison against the state-of-the-art methods on numerous challenging benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Current event-/frame-event based trackers undergo evaluation on short-term tracking datasets, however, the tracking of real-world scenarios involves long-term tracking, and the performance of existing tracking algorithms in these scenarios remains unclear. In this paper, we first propose a new long-term and large-scale frame-event single object tracking dataset, termed FELT. It contains 742 videos and 1,594,474 RGB frames and event stream pairs and has become the largest frame-event tracking dataset to date. We re-train and evaluate 15 baseline trackers on our dataset for future works to compare. More importantly, we find that the RGB frames and event streams are naturally incomplete due to the influence of challenging factors and spatially sparse event flow. In response to this, we propose a novel associative memory Transformer network as a unified backbone by introducing modern Hopfield layers into multi-head self-attention blocks to fuse both RGB and event data. Extensive experiments on RGB-Event (FELT), RGB-Thermal (RGBT234, LasHeR), and RGB-Depth (DepthTrack) datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our model. The dataset and source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/FELT_SOT_Benchmark}.
Motivated by the Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) in large language models, we propose LoRAT, a method that unveils the power of large ViT model for tracking within laboratory-level resources. The essence of our work lies in adapting LoRA, a technique that fine-tunes a small subset of model parameters without adding inference latency, to the domain of visual tracking. However, unique challenges and potential domain gaps make this transfer not as easy as the first intuition. Firstly, a transformer-based tracker constructs unshared position embedding for template and search image. This poses a challenge for the transfer of LoRA, usually requiring consistency in the design when applied to the pre-trained backbone, to downstream tasks. Secondly, the inductive bias inherent in convolutional heads diminishes the effectiveness of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in tracking models. To overcome these limitations, we first decouple the position embeddings in transformer-based trackers into shared spatial ones and independent type ones. The shared embeddings, which describe the absolute coordinates of multi-resolution images (namely, the template and search images), are inherited from the pre-trained backbones. In contrast, the independent embeddings indicate the sources of each token and are learned from scratch. Furthermore, we design an anchor-free head solely based on MLP to adapt PETR, enabling better performance with less computational overhead. With our design, 1) it becomes practical to train trackers with the ViT-g backbone on GPUs with only memory of 25.8GB (batch size of 16); 2) we reduce the training time of the L-224 variant from 35.0 to 10.8 GPU hours; 3) we improve the LaSOT SUC score from 0.703 to 0.742 with the L-224 variant; 4) we fast the inference speed of the L-224 variant from 52 to 119 FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LitingLin/LoRAT.
Flexible endoscope motion tracking and analysis in mechanical simulators have proven useful for endoscopy training. Common motion tracking methods based on electromagnetic tracker are however limited by their high cost and material susceptibility. In this work, the motion-guided dual-camera vision tracker is proposed to provide robust and accurate tracking of the endoscope tip's 3D position. The tracker addresses several unique challenges of tracking flexible endoscope tip inside a dynamic, life-sized mechanical simulator. To address the appearance variation and keep dual-camera tracking consistency, the cross-camera mutual template strategy (CMT) is proposed by introducing dynamic transient mutual templates. To alleviate large occlusion and light-induced distortion, the Mamba-based motion-guided prediction head (MMH) is presented to aggregate historical motion with visual tracking. The proposed tracker achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art vision trackers, achieving 42% and 72% improvements against the second-best method in average error and maximum error. Further motion analysis involving novice and expert endoscopists also shows that the tip 3D motion provided by the proposed tracker enables more reliable motion analysis and more substantial differentiation between different expertise levels, compared with other trackers.
In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, dubbed VastTrack, towards facilitating the development of more general visual tracking via encompassing abundant classes and videos. VastTrack possesses several attractive properties: (1) Vast Object Category. In particular, it covers target objects from 2,115 classes, largely surpassing object categories of existing popular benchmarks (e.g., GOT-10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). With such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking. (2) Larger scale. Compared with current benchmarks, VastTrack offers 50,610 sequences with 4.2 million frames, which makes it to date the largest benchmark regarding the number of videos, and thus could benefit training even more powerful visual trackers in the deep learning era. (3) Rich Annotation. Besides conventional bounding box annotations, VastTrack also provides linguistic descriptions for the videos. The rich annotations of VastTrack enables development of both the vision-only and the vision-language tracking. To ensure precise annotation, all videos are manually labeled with multiple rounds of careful inspection and refinement. To understand performance of existing trackers and to provide baselines for future comparison, we extensively assess 25 representative trackers. The results, not surprisingly, show significant drops compared to those on current datasets due to lack of abundant categories and videos from diverse scenarios for training, and more efforts are required to improve general tracking. Our VastTrack and all the evaluation results will be made publicly available https://github.com/HengLan/VastTrack.
Single object tracking aims to locate the target object in a video sequence according to the state specified by different modal references, including the initial bounding box (BBOX), natural language (NL), or both (NL+BBOX). Due to the gap between different modalities, most existing trackers are designed for single or partial of these reference settings and overspecialize on the specific modality. Differently, we present a unified tracker called UVLTrack, which can simultaneously handle all three reference settings (BBOX, NL, NL+BBOX) with the same parameters. The proposed UVLTrack enjoys several merits. First, we design a modality-unified feature extractor for joint visual and language feature learning and propose a multi-modal contrastive loss to align the visual and language features into a unified semantic space. Second, a modality-adaptive box head is proposed, which makes full use of the target reference to mine ever-changing scenario features dynamically from video contexts and distinguish the target in a contrastive way, enabling robust performance in different reference settings. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UVLTrack achieves promising performance on seven visual tracking datasets, three vision-language tracking datasets, and three visual grounding datasets. Codes and models will be open-sourced at https://github.com/OpenSpaceAI/UVLTrack.
How to effectively exploit spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture target appearance changes in visual tracking. However, most deep learning-based trackers mainly focus on designing a complicated appearance model or template updating strategy, while lacking the exploitation of context between consecutive frames and thus entailing the \textit{when-and-how-to-update} dilemma. To address these issues, we propose a novel explicit visual prompts framework for visual tracking, dubbed \textbf{EVPTrack}. Specifically, we utilize spatio-temporal tokens to propagate information between consecutive frames without focusing on updating templates. As a result, we cannot only alleviate the challenge of \textit{when-to-update}, but also avoid the hyper-parameters associated with updating strategies. Then, we utilize the spatio-temporal tokens to generate explicit visual prompts that facilitate inference in the current frame. The prompts are fed into a transformer encoder together with the image tokens without additional processing. Consequently, the efficiency of our model is improved by avoiding \textit{how-to-update}. In addition, we consider multi-scale information as explicit visual prompts, providing multiscale template features to enhance the EVPTrack's ability to handle target scale changes. Extensive experimental results on six benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT, LaSOT\rm $_{ext}$, GOT-10k, UAV123, TrackingNet, and TNL2K.) validate that our EVPTrack can achieve competitive performance at a real-time speed by effectively exploiting both spatio-temporal and multi-scale information. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EVPTrack.
Online contextual reasoning and association across consecutive video frames are critical to perceive instances in visual tracking. However, most current top-performing trackers persistently lean on sparse temporal relationships between reference and search frames via an offline mode. Consequently, they can only interact independently within each image-pair and establish limited temporal correlations. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a simple, flexible and effective video-level tracking pipeline, named \textbf{ODTrack}, which densely associates the contextual relationships of video frames in an online token propagation manner. ODTrack receives video frames of arbitrary length to capture the spatio-temporal trajectory relationships of an instance, and compresses the discrimination features (localization information) of a target into a token sequence to achieve frame-to-frame association. This new solution brings the following benefits: 1) the purified token sequences can serve as prompts for the inference in the next video frame, whereby past information is leveraged to guide future inference; 2) the complex online update strategies are effectively avoided by the iterative propagation of token sequences, and thus we can achieve more efficient model representation and computation. ODTrack achieves a new \textit{SOTA} performance on seven benchmarks, while running at real-time speed. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/ODTrack}.
Visual tracking often faces challenges such as invalid targets and decreased performance in low-light conditions when relying solely on RGB image sequences. While incorporating additional modalities like depth and infrared data has proven effective, existing multi-modal imaging platforms are complex and lack real-world applicability. In contrast, near-infrared (NIR) imaging, commonly used in surveillance cameras, can switch between RGB and NIR based on light intensity. However, tracking objects across these heterogeneous modalities poses significant challenges, particularly due to the absence of modality switch signals during tracking. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive cross-modal object tracking algorithm called Modality-Aware Fusion Network (MAFNet). MAFNet efficiently integrates information from both RGB and NIR modalities using an adaptive weighting mechanism, effectively bridging the appearance gap and enabling a modality-aware target representation. It consists of two key components: an adaptive weighting module and a modality-specific representation module......
Recently, the transformer has enabled the speed-oriented trackers to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with high-speed thanks to the smaller input size or the lighter feature extraction backbone, though they still substantially lag behind their corresponding performance-oriented versions. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to narrow or even close this gap while achieving high tracking speed based on the smaller input size. To this end, we non-uniformly resize the cropped image to have a smaller input size while the resolution of the area where the target is more likely to appear is higher and vice versa. This enables us to solve the dilemma of attending to a larger visual field while retaining more raw information for the target despite a smaller input size. Our formulation for the non-uniform resizing can be efficiently solved through quadratic programming (QP) and naturally integrated into most of the crop-based local trackers. Comprehensive experiments on five challenging datasets based on two kinds of transformer trackers, \ie, OSTrack and TransT, demonstrate consistent improvements over them. In particular, applying our method to the speed-oriented version of OSTrack even outperforms its performance-oriented counterpart by 0.6% AUC on TNL2K, while running 50% faster and saving over 55% MACs. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Kou-99/ZoomTrack.
Trackers that follow Siamese paradigm utilize similarity matching between template and search region features for tracking. Many methods have been explored to enhance tracking performance by incorporating tracking history to better handle scenarios involving target appearance variations such as deformation and occlusion. However, the utilization of historical information in existing methods is insufficient and incomprehensive, which typically requires repetitive training and introduces a large amount of computation. In this paper, we show that by providing a tracker that follows Siamese paradigm with precise and updated historical information, a significant performance improvement can be achieved with completely unchanged parameters. Based on this, we propose a historical prompt network that uses refined historical foreground masks and historical visual features of the target to provide comprehensive and precise prompts for the tracker. We build a novel tracker called HIPTrack based on the historical prompt network, which achieves considerable performance improvements without the need to retrain the entire model. We conduct experiments on seven datasets and experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art trackers on LaSOT, LaSOText, GOT-10k and NfS. Furthermore, the historical prompt network can seamlessly integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing trackers, providing performance enhancements. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/HIPTrack.
Visual object tracking is a fundamental component of transportation systems, especially for intelligent driving. Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance in visual tracking, recent single-branch trackers tend to overlook the weak prior assumptions associated with the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder and inference pipeline in visual tracking. Moreover, the effectiveness of discriminative trackers remains constrained due to the adoption of the dual-branch pipeline. To tackle the inferior effectiveness of vanilla ViT, we propose an Adaptive ViT Model Prediction tracker (AViTMP) to design a customised tracking method. This method bridges the single-branch network with discriminative models for the first time. Specifically, in the proposed encoder AViT encoder, we introduce a tracking-tailored Adaptor module for vanilla ViT and a joint target state embedding to enrich the target-prior embedding paradigm. Then, we combine the AViT encoder with a discriminative transformer-specific model predictor to predict the accurate location. Furthermore, to mitigate the limitations of conventional inference practice, we present a novel inference pipeline called CycleTrack, which bolsters the tracking robustness in the presence of distractors via bidirectional cycle tracking verification. In the experiments, we evaluated AViTMP on eight tracking benchmarks for a comprehensive assessment, including LaSOT, LaSOTExtSub, AVisT, etc. The experimental results unequivocally establish that, under fair comparison, AViTMP achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in terms of long-term tracking and robustness. The source code will be released at https://github.com/Tchuanm/AViTMP.
Tracking using bio-inspired event cameras has drawn more and more attention in recent years. Existing works either utilize aligned RGB and event data for accurate tracking or directly learn an event-based tracker. The first category needs more cost for inference and the second one may be easily influenced by noisy events or sparse spatial resolution. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation framework that can fully utilize multi-modal / multi-view information during training to facilitate knowledge transfer, enabling us to achieve high-speed and low-latency visual tracking during testing by using only event signals. Specifically, a teacher Transformer-based multi-modal tracking framework is first trained by feeding the RGB frame and event stream simultaneously. Then, we design a new hierarchical knowledge distillation strategy which includes pairwise similarity, feature representation, and response maps-based knowledge distillation to guide the learning of the student Transformer network. Moreover, since existing event-based tracking datasets are all low-resolution ($346 \times 260$), we propose the first large-scale high-resolution ($1280 \times 720$) dataset named EventVOT. It contains 1141 videos and covers a wide range of categories such as pedestrians, vehicles, UAVs, ping pongs, etc. Extensive experiments on both low-resolution (FE240hz, VisEvent, COESOT), and our newly proposed high-resolution EventVOT dataset fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed method. The dataset, evaluation toolkit, and source code are available on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/EventVOT_Benchmark}