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.
Interpreting motion captured in image sequences is crucial for a wide range of computer vision applications. Typical estimation approaches include optical flow (OF), which approximates the apparent motion instantaneously in a scene, and multiple object tracking (MOT), which tracks the motion of subjects over time. Often, the motion of objects in a scene is governed by some underlying dynamical system which could be inferred by analyzing the motion of groups of objects. Standard motion analyses, however, are not designed to intuit flow dynamics from trajectory data, making such measurements difficult in practice. The goal of this work is to extend gradient-based dynamical systems analyses to real-world applications characterized by complex, feature-rich image sequences with imperfect tracers. The tracer trajectories are tracked using deep vision networks and gradients are approximated using Lagrangian gradient regression (LGR), a tool designed to estimate spatial gradients from sparse data. From gradients, dynamical features such as regions of coherent rotation and transport barriers are identified. The proposed approach is affordably implemented and enables advanced studies including the motion analysis of two distinct object classes in a single image sequence. Two examples of the method are presented on data sets for which standard gradient-based analyses do not apply.
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.
This paper tackles the challenge of multi-sensor multi-object tracking by proposing various decentralised Variational Inference (VI) schemes that match the tracking performance of centralised sensor fusion with only local message exchanges among neighboring sensors. We first establish a centralised VI sensor fusion scheme as a benchmark and analyse the limitations of its decentralised counterpart, which requires sensors to await consensus at each VI iteration. Therefore, we propose a decentralised gradient-based VI framework that optimises the Locally Maximised Evidence Lower Bound (LM-ELBO) instead of the standard ELBO, which reduces the parameter search space and enables faster convergence, making it particularly beneficial for decentralised tracking. This proposed framework is inherently self-evolving, improving with advancements in decentralised optimisation techniques for convergence guarantees and efficiency. Further, we enhance the convergence speed of proposed decentralised schemes using natural gradients and gradient tracking strategies. Results verify that our decentralised VI schemes are empirically equivalent to centralised fusion in tracking performance. Notably, the decentralised natural gradient VI method is the most communication-efficient, with communication costs comparable to suboptimal decentralised strategies while delivering notably higher tracking accuracy.
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.
Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera Tracking tRansformer (MCTR), a novel end-to-end approach tailored for multi-object detection and tracking across multiple cameras with overlapping fields of view. MCTR leverages end-to-end detectors like DEtector TRansformer (DETR) to produce detections and detection embeddings independently for each camera view. The framework maintains set of track embeddings that encaplusate global information about the tracked objects, and updates them at every frame by integrating the local information from the view-specific detection embeddings. The track embeddings are probabilistically associated with detections in every camera view and frame to generate consistent object tracks. The soft probabilistic association facilitates the design of differentiable losses that enable end-to-end training of the entire system. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on MMPTrack and AI City Challenge, two recently introduced large-scale multi-camera multi-object tracking datasets.
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 .
Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to construct moving trajectories for objects, and modern multi-object trackers mainly utilize the tracking-by-detection methodology. Initial approaches to MOT attacks primarily aimed to degrade the detection quality of the frames under attack, thereby reducing accuracy only in those specific frames, highlighting a lack of \textit{efficiency}. To improve efficiency, recent advancements manipulate object positions to cause persistent identity (ID) switches during the association phase, even after the attack ends within a few frames. However, these position-manipulating attacks have inherent limitations, as they can be easily counteracted by adjusting distance-related parameters in the association phase, revealing a lack of \textit{robustness}. In this paper, we present \textsf{BankTweak}, a novel adversarial attack designed for MOT trackers, which features efficiency and robustness. \textsf{BankTweak} focuses on the feature extractor in the association phase and reveals vulnerability in the Hungarian matching method used by feature-based MOT systems. Exploiting the vulnerability, \textsf{BankTweak} induces persistent ID switches (addressing \textit{efficiency}) even after the attack ends by strategically injecting altered features into the feature banks without modifying object positions (addressing \textit{robustness}). To demonstrate the applicability, we apply \textsf{BankTweak} to three multi-object trackers (DeepSORT, StrongSORT, and MOTDT) with one-stage, two-stage, anchor-free, and transformer detectors. Extensive experiments on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets show that our method substantially surpasses existing attacks, exposing the vulnerability of the tracking-by-detection framework to \textsf{BankTweak}.
Hyperspectral object tracking (HOT) has exhibited potential in various applications, particularly in scenes where objects are camouflaged. Existing trackers can effectively retrieve objects via band regrouping because of the bias in existing HOT datasets, where most objects tend to have distinguishing visual appearances rather than spectral characteristics. This bias allows the tracker to directly use the visual features obtained from the false-color images generated by hyperspectral images without the need to extract spectral features. To tackle this bias, we find that the tracker should focus on the spectral information when object appearance is unreliable. Thus, we provide a new task called hyperspectral camouflaged object tracking (HCOT) and meticulously construct a large-scale HCOT dataset, termed BihoT, which consists of 41,912 hyperspectral images covering 49 video sequences. The dataset covers various artificial camouflage scenes where objects have similar appearances, diverse spectrums, and frequent occlusion, making it a very challenging dataset for HCOT. Besides, a simple but effective baseline model, named spectral prompt-based distractor-aware network (SPDAN), is proposed, comprising a spectral embedding network (SEN), a spectral prompt-based backbone network (SPBN), and a distractor-aware module (DAM). Specifically, the SEN extracts spectral-spatial features via 3-D and 2-D convolutions. Then, the SPBN fine-tunes powerful RGB trackers with spectral prompts and alleviates the insufficiency of training samples. Moreover, the DAM utilizes a novel statistic to capture the distractor caused by occlusion from objects and background. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed SPDAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed BihoT and other HOT datasets.
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
For interacting with mobile objects in unfamiliar environments, simultaneously locating, mapping, and tracking the 3D poses of multiple objects are crucially required. This paper proposes a Tracklet Graph and Query Graph-based framework, i.e., GSLAMOT, to address this challenge. GSLAMOT utilizes camera and LiDAR multimodal information as inputs and divides the representation of the dynamic scene into a semantic map for representing the static environment, a trajectory of the ego-agent, and an online maintained Tracklet Graph (TG) for tracking and predicting the 3D poses of the detected mobile objects. A Query Graph (QG) is constructed in each frame by object detection to query and update TG. For accurate object association, a Multi-criteria Star Graph Association (MSGA) method is proposed to find matched objects between the detections in QG and the predicted tracklets in TG. Then, an Object-centric Graph Optimization (OGO) method is proposed to simultaneously optimize the TG, the semantic map, and the agent trajectory. It triangulates the detected objects into the map to enrich the map's semantic information. We address the efficiency issues to handle the three tightly coupled tasks in parallel. Experiments are conducted on KITTI, Waymo, and an emulated Traffic Congestion dataset that highlights challenging scenarios. Experiments show that GSLAMOT enables accurate crowded object tracking while conducting SLAM accurately in challenging scenarios, demonstrating more excellent performances than the state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset are at https://gslamot.github.io.
Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.
We present a novel filtering algorithm that employs Bayesian transfer learning to address the challenges posed by mismatched intensity of the noise in a pair of sensors, each of which tracks an object using a nonlinear dynamic system model. In this setting, the primary sensor experiences a higher noise intensity in tracking the object than the source sensor. To improve the estimation accuracy of the primary sensor, we propose a framework that integrates Bayesian transfer learning into an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and a Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF). In this approach, the parameters of the predicted observations in the source sensor are transferred to the primary sensor and used as an additional prior in the filtering process. Our simulation results show that the transfer learning approach significantly outperforms the conventional isolated UKF and CKF. Comparisons to a form of measurement vector fusion are also presented.
The field of autonomous driving increasingly demands high-quality annotated video training data. In this paper, we propose Panacea+, a powerful and universally applicable framework for generating video data in driving scenes. Built upon the foundation of our previous work, Panacea, Panacea+ adopts a multi-view appearance noise prior mechanism and a super-resolution module for enhanced consistency and increased resolution. Extensive experiments show that the generated video samples from Panacea+ greatly benefit a wide range of tasks on different datasets, including 3D object tracking, 3D object detection, and lane detection tasks on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 dataset. These results strongly prove Panacea+ to be a valuable data generation framework for autonomous driving.
Data association is an essential part in the tracking-by-detection based Multi-Object Tracking (MOT). Most trackers focus on how to design a better data association strategy to improve the tracking performance. The rule-based handcrafted association methods are simple and highly efficient but lack generalization capability to deal with complex scenes. While the learnt association methods can learn high-order contextual information to deal with various complex scenes, but they have the limitations of higher complexity and cost. To address these limitations, we propose a Robust Two-stage Association Tracker, named RTAT. The first-stage association is performed between tracklets and detections to generate tracklets with high purity, and the second-stage association is performed between tracklets to form complete trajectories. For the first-stage association, we use a simple data association strategy to generate tracklets with high purity by setting a low threshold for the matching cost in the assignment process. We conduct the tracklet association in the second-stage based on the framework of message-passing GNN. Our method models the tracklet association as a series of edge classification problem in hierarchical graphs, which can recursively merge short tracklets into longer ones. Our tracker RTAT ranks first on the test set of MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks in most of the main MOT metrics: HOTA, IDF1, and AssA. We achieve 67.2 HOTA, 84.7 IDF1, and 69.7 AssA on MOT17, and 66.2 HOTA, 82.5 IDF1, and 68.1 AssA on MOT20.
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.
While the tracking of multiple extended targets demands for sophisticated algorithms to handle the high complexity inherent to the task, it also requires low runtime for online execution in real-world scenarios. In this work, we derive a batch update for the recently introduced elliptical-target tracker called MEM-EKF*. The MEM-EKF* is based on the same likelihood as the well-established random matrix approach but is derived from the multiplicative error model (MEM) and uses an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to update the target state sequentially, i.e., measurement-by-measurement. Our batch variant updates the target state in a single step based on straightforward sums over all measurements and the MEM-specific pseudo-measurements. This drastically reduces the scaling constant for typical implementations and indeed we find a speedup of roughly 100x in our numerical experiments. At the same time, the estimation error which we measure using the Gaussian Wasserstein distance stays significantly below that of the random matrix approach in coordinated turn scenarios while being comparable otherwise.