Multi-object tracking (MOT) emerges as a pivotal and highly promising branch in the field of computer vision. Classical closed-vocabulary MOT (CV-MOT) methods aim to track objects of predefined categories. Recently, some open-vocabulary MOT (OV-MOT) methods have successfully addressed the problem of tracking unknown categories. However, we found that the CV-MOT and OV-MOT methods each struggle to excel in the tasks of the other. In this paper, we present a unified framework, Associate Everything Detected (AED), that simultaneously tackles CV-MOT and OV-MOT by integrating with any off-the-shelf detector and supports unknown categories. Different from existing tracking-by-detection MOT methods, AED gets rid of prior knowledge (e.g. motion cues) and relies solely on highly robust feature learning to handle complex trajectories in OV-MOT tasks while keeping excellent performance in CV-MOT tasks. Specifically, we model the association task as a similarity decoding problem and propose a sim-decoder with an association-centric learning mechanism. The sim-decoder calculates similarities in three aspects: spatial, temporal, and cross-clip. Subsequently, association-centric learning leverages these threefold similarities to ensure that the extracted features are appropriate for continuous tracking and robust enough to generalize to unknown categories. Compared with existing powerful OV-MOT and CV-MOT methods, AED achieves superior performance on TAO, SportsMOT, and DanceTrack without any prior knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/balabooooo/AED.
Extracting and matching Re-Identification (ReID) features is used by many state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods, particularly effective against frequent and long-term occlusions. While end-to-end object detection and tracking have been the main focus of recent research, they have yet to outperform traditional methods in benchmarks like MOT17 and MOT20. Thus, from an application standpoint, methods with separate detection and embedding remain the best option for accuracy, modularity, and ease of implementation, though they are impractical for edge devices due to the overhead involved. In this paper, we investigate a selective approach to minimize the overhead of feature extraction while preserving accuracy, modularity, and ease of implementation. This approach can be integrated into various SOTA methods. We demonstrate its effectiveness by applying it to StrongSORT and Deep OC-SORT. Experiments on MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack datasets show that our mechanism retains the advantages of feature extraction during occlusions while significantly reducing runtime. Additionally, it improves accuracy by preventing confusion in the feature-matching stage, particularly in cases of deformation and appearance similarity, which are common in DanceTrack. https://github.com/emirhanbayar/Fast-StrongSORT, https://github.com/emirhanbayar/Fast-Deep-OC-SORT
Video synopsis is an efficient method for condensing surveillance videos. This technique begins with the detection and tracking of objects, followed by the creation of object tubes. These tubes consist of sequences, each containing chronologically ordered bounding boxes of a unique object. To generate a condensed video, the first step involves rearranging the object tubes to maximize the number of non-overlapping objects in each frame. Then, these tubes are stitched to a background image extracted from the source video. The lack of a standard dataset for the video synopsis task hinders the comparison of different video synopsis models. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a standard dataset, called SynoClip, designed specifically for the video synopsis task. SynoClip includes all the necessary features needed to evaluate various models directly and effectively. Additionally, this work introduces a video synopsis model, called FGS, with low computational cost. The model includes an empty-frame object detector to identify frames empty of any objects, facilitating efficient utilization of the deep object detector. Moreover, a tube grouping algorithm is proposed to maintain relationships among tubes in the synthesized video. This is followed by a greedy tube rearrangement algorithm, which efficiently determines the start time of each tube. Finally, the proposed model is evaluated using the proposed dataset. The source code, fine-tuned object detection model, and tutorials are available at https://github.com/Ramtin-ma/VideoSynopsis-FGS.
The Lightweight Integrated Tracking-Feature Extraction (LITE) paradigm is introduced as a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) approach. It enhances ReID-based trackers by eliminating inference, pre-processing, post-processing, and ReID model training costs. LITE uses real-time appearance features without compromising speed. By integrating appearance feature extraction directly into the tracking pipeline using standard CNN-based detectors such as YOLOv8m, LITE demonstrates significant performance improvements. The simplest implementation of LITE on top of classic DeepSORT achieves a HOTA score of 43.03% at 28.3 FPS on the MOT17 benchmark, making it twice as fast as DeepSORT on MOT17 and four times faster on the more crowded MOT20 dataset, while maintaining similar accuracy. Additionally, a new evaluation framework for tracking-by-detection approaches reveals that conventional trackers like DeepSORT remain competitive with modern state-of-the-art trackers when evaluated under fair conditions. The code will be available post-publication at https://github.com/Jumabek/LITE.
Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S$^2$L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks. Code and models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Xavier-Lin/TrackSSM}.
While Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has made substantial advancements, it is limited by heavy reliance on prior knowledge and limited to predefined categories. In contrast, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT), tracking multiple objects with similar appearance, requires less prior information about the targets but faces challenges with variants like viewpoint, lighting, occlusion, and resolution. Our contributions commence with the introduction of the \textbf{\text{Refer-GMOT dataset}} a collection of videos, each accompanied by fine-grained textual descriptions of their attributes. Subsequently, we introduce a novel text prompt-based open-vocabulary GMOT framework, called \textbf{\text{TP-GMOT}}, which can track never-seen object categories with zero training examples. Within \text{TP-GMOT} framework, we introduce two novel components: (i) {\textbf{\text{TP-OD}}, an object detection by a textual prompt}, for accurately detecting unseen objects with specific characteristics. (ii) Motion-Appearance Cost SORT \textbf{\text{MAC-SORT}}, a novel object association approach that adeptly integrates motion and appearance-based matching strategies to tackle the complex task of tracking multiple generic objects with high similarity. Our contributions are benchmarked on the \text{Refer-GMOT} dataset for GMOT task. Additionally, to assess the generalizability of the proposed \text{TP-GMOT} framework and the effectiveness of \text{MAC-SORT} tracker, we conduct ablation studies on the DanceTrack and MOT20 datasets for the MOT task. Our dataset, code, and models will be publicly available at: https://fsoft-aic.github.io/TP-GMOT
The tracking-by-detection paradigm is the mainstream in multi-object tracking, associating tracks to the predictions of an object detector. Although exhibiting uncertainty through a confidence score, these predictions do not capture the entire variability of the inference process. For safety and security critical applications like autonomous driving, surveillance, etc., knowing this predictive uncertainty is essential though. Therefore, we introduce, for the first time, a fast way to obtain the empirical predictive distribution during object detection and incorporate that knowledge in multi-object tracking. Our mechanism can easily be integrated into state-of-the-art trackers, enabling them to fully exploit the uncertainty in the detections. Additionally, novel association methods are introduced that leverage the proposed mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contribution on a variety of benchmarks, such as MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack, and KITTI.
Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from two-dimensional images is an active research field in computer vision, with applications ranging from navigation and object tracking to segmentation and three-dimensional modeling. Traditionally, parametric techniques have been employed for this task. However, recent advancements have seen a shift towards learning-based methods. Given the rapid pace of research and the frequent introduction of new image matching methods, it is essential to evaluate them. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of various image matching methods using a structure-from-motion pipeline. We assess the performance of these methods on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, identifying key limitations in both the methods and benchmarks. We also investigate the impact of edge detection as a pre-processing step. Our analysis reveals that image matching for 3D reconstruction remains an open challenge, necessitating careful selection and tuning of models for specific scenarios, while also highlighting mismatches in how metrics currently represent method performance.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical technology in computer vision, designed to detect multiple targets in video sequences and assign each target a unique ID per frame. Existed MOT methods excel at accurately tracking multiple objects in real-time across various scenarios. However, these methods still face challenges such as poor noise resistance and frequent ID switches. In this research, we propose a novel ConsistencyTrack, joint detection and tracking(JDT) framework that formulates detection and association as a denoising diffusion process on perturbed bounding boxes. This progressive denoising strategy significantly improves the model's noise resistance. During the training phase, paired object boxes within two adjacent frames are diffused from ground-truth boxes to a random distribution, and then the model learns to detect and track by reversing this process. In inference, the model refines randomly generated boxes into detection and tracking results through minimal denoising steps. ConsistencyTrack also introduces an innovative target association strategy to address target occlusion. Experiments on the MOT17 and DanceTrack datasets demonstrate that ConsistencyTrack outperforms other compared methods, especially better than DiffusionTrack in inference speed and other performance metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tankowa/ConsistencyTrack.
Visual tracking has seen remarkable advancements, largely driven by the availability of large-scale training datasets that have enabled the development of highly accurate and robust algorithms. While significant progress has been made in tracking general objects, research on more challenging scenarios, such as tracking camouflaged objects, remains limited. Camouflaged objects, which blend seamlessly with their surroundings or other objects, present unique challenges for detection and tracking in complex environments. This challenge is particularly critical in applications such as military, security, agriculture, and marine monitoring, where precise tracking of camouflaged objects is essential. To address this gap, we introduce the Camouflaged Object Tracking Dataset (COTD), a specialized benchmark designed specifically for evaluating camouflaged object tracking methods. The COTD dataset comprises 200 sequences and approximately 80,000 frames, each annotated with detailed bounding boxes. Our evaluation of 20 existing tracking algorithms reveals significant deficiencies in their performance with camouflaged objects. To address these issues, we propose a novel tracking framework, HiPTrack-MLS, which demonstrates promising results in improving tracking performance for camouflaged objects. COTD and code are avialable at https://github.com/openat25/HIPTrack-MLS.
Multiple object tracking (MOT) depends heavily on selection of true positive detected bounding boxes. However, this aspect of the problem is mostly overlooked or mitigated by employing two-stage association and utilizing low confidence detections in the second stage. Recently proposed BoostTrack attempts to avoid the drawbacks of multiple stage association approach and use low-confidence detections by applying detection confidence boosting. In this paper, we identify the limitations of the confidence boost used in BoostTrack and propose a method to improve its performance. To construct a richer similarity measure and enable a better selection of true positive detections, we propose to use a combination of shape, Mahalanobis distance and novel soft BIoU similarity. We propose a soft detection confidence boost technique which calculates new confidence scores based on the similarity measure and the previous confidence scores, and we introduce varying similarity threshold to account for lower similarity measure between detections and tracklets which are not regularly updated. The proposed additions are mutually independent and can be used in any MOT algorithm. Combined with the BoostTrack+ baseline, our method achieves near state of the art results on the MOT17 dataset and new state of the art HOTA and IDF1 scores on the MOT20 dataset. The source code is available at: https://github.com/vukasin-stanojevic/BoostTrack .
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.
The evaluation of cell tracking results steers the development of tracking methods, significantly impacting biomedical research. This is quantitatively achieved by means of evaluation metrics. Unfortunately, current metrics favor local correctness and weakly reward global coherence, impeding high-level biological analysis. To also foster global coherence, we propose the CHOTA metric (Cell-specific Higher Order Tracking Accuracy) which unifies the evaluation of all relevant aspects of cell tracking: cell detections and local associations, global coherence, and lineage tracking. We achieve this by introducing a new definition of the term 'trajectory' that includes the entire cell lineage and by including this into the well-established HOTA metric from general multiple object tracking. Furthermore, we provide a detailed survey of contemporary cell tracking metrics to compare our novel CHOTA metric and to show its advantages. All metrics are extensively evaluated on state-of-the-art real-data cell tracking results and synthetic results that simulate specific tracking errors. We show that CHOTA is sensitive to all tracking errors and gives a good indication of the biologically relevant capability of a method to reconstruct the full lineage of cells. It introduces a robust and comprehensive alternative to the currently used metrics in cell tracking. Python code is available at https://github.com/CellTrackingChallenge/py-ctcmetrics .
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
We introduce FruitNeRF, a unified novel fruit counting framework that leverages state-of-the-art view synthesis methods to count any fruit type directly in 3D. Our framework takes an unordered set of posed images captured by a monocular camera and segments fruit in each image. To make our system independent of the fruit type, we employ a foundation model that generates binary segmentation masks for any fruit. Utilizing both modalities, RGB and semantic, we train a semantic neural radiance field. Through uniform volume sampling of the implicit Fruit Field, we obtain fruit-only point clouds. By applying cascaded clustering on the extracted point cloud, our approach achieves precise fruit count.The use of neural radiance fields provides significant advantages over conventional methods such as object tracking or optical flow, as the counting itself is lifted into 3D. Our method prevents double counting fruit and avoids counting irrelevant fruit.We evaluate our methodology using both real-world and synthetic datasets. The real-world dataset consists of three apple trees with manually counted ground truths, a benchmark apple dataset with one row and ground truth fruit location, while the synthetic dataset comprises various fruit types including apple, plum, lemon, pear, peach, and mango.Additionally, we assess the performance of fruit counting using the foundation model compared to a U-Net.
Current 3D single object tracking methods primarily rely on the Siamese matching-based paradigm, which struggles with textureless and incomplete LiDAR point clouds. Conversely, the motion-centric paradigm avoids appearance matching, thus overcoming these issues. However, its complex multi-stage pipeline and the limited temporal modeling capability of a single-stream architecture constrain its potential. In this paper, we introduce SiamMo, a novel and simple Siamese motion-centric tracking approach. Unlike the traditional single-stream architecture, we employ Siamese feature extraction for motion-centric tracking. This decouples feature extraction from temporal fusion, significantly enhancing tracking performance. Additionally, we design a Spatio-Temporal Feature Aggregation module to integrate Siamese features at multiple scales, capturing motion information effectively. We also introduce a Box-aware Feature Encoding module to encode object size priors into motion estimation. SiamMo is a purely motion-centric tracker that eliminates the need for additional processes like segmentation and box refinement. Without whistles and bells, SiamMo not only surpasses state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks but also demonstrates exceptional robustness in challenging scenarios. SiamMo sets a new record on the KITTI tracking benchmark with 90.1\% precision while maintaining a high inference speed of 108 FPS. The code will be released at https://github.com/HDU-VRLab/SiamMo.
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.
Medical image segmentation plays a pivotal role in clinical diagnostics and treatment planning, yet existing models often face challenges in generalization and in handling both 2D and 3D data uniformly. In this paper, we introduce Medical SAM 2 (MedSAM-2), a generalized auto-tracking model for universal 2D and 3D medical image segmentation. The core concept is to leverage the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) pipeline to treat all 2D and 3D medical segmentation tasks as a video object tracking problem. To put it into practice, we propose a novel \emph{self-sorting memory bank} mechanism that dynamically selects informative embeddings based on confidence and dissimilarity, regardless of temporal order. This mechanism not only significantly improves performance in 3D medical image segmentation but also unlocks a \emph{One-Prompt Segmentation} capability for 2D images, allowing segmentation across multiple images from a single prompt without temporal relationships. We evaluated MedSAM-2 on five 2D tasks and nine 3D tasks, including white blood cells, optic cups, retinal vessels, mandibles, coronary arteries, kidney tumors, liver tumors, breast cancer, nasopharynx cancer, vestibular schwannoma, mediastinal lymph nodules, cerebral artery, inferior alveolar nerve, and abdominal organs, comparing it against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in task-tailored, general and interactive segmentation settings. Our findings demonstrate that MedSAM-2 surpasses a wide range of existing models and updates new SOTA on several benchmarks. The code is released on the project page: https://supermedintel.github.io/Medical-SAM2/.
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a computer vision task that has been employed in a variety of sectors. Some common limitations in MOT are varying object appearances, occlusions, or crowded scenes. To address these challenges, machine learning methods have been extensively deployed, leveraging large datasets, sophisticated models, and substantial computational resources. Due to practical limitations, access to the above is not always an option. However, with the recent release of foundation models by prominent AI companies, pretrained models have been trained on vast datasets and resources using state-of-the-art methods. This work tries to leverage one such foundation model, called DINOv2, through using knowledge distillation. The proposed method uses a teacher-student architecture, where DINOv2 is the teacher and the FairMOT backbone HRNetv2 W18 is the student. The results imply that although the proposed method shows improvements in certain scenarios, it does not consistently outperform the original FairMOT model. These findings highlight the potential and limitations of applying foundation models in knowledge
Panoramic cycling videos can record 360{\deg} views around the cyclists. Thus, it is essential to conduct automatic road user analysis on them using computer vision models to provide data for studies on cycling safety. However, the features of panoramic data such as severe distortions, large number of small objects and boundary continuity have brought great challenges to the existing CV models, including poor performance and evaluation methods that are no longer applicable. In addition, due to the lack of data with annotations, it is not easy to re-train the models. In response to these problems, the project proposed and implemented a three-step methodology: (1) improve the prediction performance of the pre-trained object detection models on panoramic data by projecting the original image into 4 perspective sub-images; (2) introduce supports for boundary continuity and category information into DeepSORT, a commonly used multiple object tracking model, and set an improved detection model as its detector; (3) using the tracking results, develop an application for detecting the overtaking behaviour of the surrounding vehicles. Evaluated on the panoramic cycling dataset built by the project, the proposed methodology improves the average precision of YOLO v5m6 and Faster RCNN-FPN under any input resolution setting. In addition, it raises MOTA and IDF1 of DeepSORT by 7.6\% and 9.7\% respectively. When detecting the overtakes in the test videos, it achieves the F-score of 0.88. The code is available on GitHub at github.com/cuppp1998/360_object_tracking to ensure the reproducibility and further improvements of results.