Visual object tracking is one of the major challenges in the field of computer vision. Correlation Filter (CF) trackers are one of the most widely used categories in tracking. Though numerous tracking algorithms based on CFs are available today, most of them fail to efficiently detect the object in an unconstrained environment with dynamically changing object appearance. In order to tackle such challenges, the existing strategies often rely on a particular set of algorithms. Here, we propose a robust framework that offers the provision to incorporate illumination and rotation invariance in the standard Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) formulation. We also supervise the detection stage of DCF trackers by eliminating false positives in the convolution response map. Further, we demonstrate the impact of displacement consistency on CF trackers. The generality and efficiency of the proposed framework is illustrated by integrating our contributions into two state-of-the-art CF trackers: SRDCF and ECO. As per the comprehensive experiments on the VOT2016 dataset, our top trackers show substantial improvement of 14.7% and 6.41% in robustness, 11.4% and 1.71% in Average Expected Overlap (AEO) over the baseline SRDCF and ECO, respectively.
In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object tracking. We also propose a Siamese Graph Convolution Network (SGCN) for human pose matching as a Re-ID module in our pose tracking system. In contrary to other Re-ID modules, we use a graphical representation of human joints for matching. The skeleton-based representation effectively captures human pose similarity and is computationally inexpensive. It is robust to sudden camera shift that introduces human drifting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to propose an online human pose tracking framework in a top-down fashion. The proposed framework is general enough to fit other pose estimators and candidate matching mechanisms. Our method outperforms other online methods while maintaining a much higher frame rate, and is very competitive with our offline state-of-the-art. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/Guanghan/lighttrack.
We present a system for generating inconspicuous-looking textures that, when displayed in the physical world as digital or printed posters, cause visual object tracking systems to become confused. For instance, as a target being tracked by a robot's camera moves in front of such a poster, our generated texture makes the tracker lock onto it and allows the target to evade. This work aims to fool seldom-targeted regression tasks, and in particular compares diverse optimization strategies: non-targeted, targeted, and a new family of guided adversarial losses. While we use the Expectation Over Transformation (EOT) algorithm to generate physical adversaries that fool tracking models when imaged under diverse conditions, we compare the impacts of different conditioning variables, including viewpoint, lighting, and appearances, to find practical attack setups with high resulting adversarial strength and convergence speed. We further showcase textures optimized solely using simulated scenes can confuse real-world tracking systems.
The current strive towards end-to-end trainable computer vision systems imposes major challenges for the task of visual tracking. In contrast to most other vision problems, tracking requires the learning of a robust target-specific appearance model online, during the inference stage. To be end-to-end trainable, the online learning of the target model thus needs to be embedded in the tracking architecture itself. Due to the imposed challenges, the popular Siamese paradigm simply predicts a target feature template, while ignoring the background appearance information during inference. Consequently, the predicted model possesses limited target-background discriminability. We develop an end-to-end tracking architecture, capable of fully exploiting both target and background appearance information for target model prediction. Our architecture is derived from a discriminative learning loss by designing a dedicated optimization process that is capable of predicting a powerful model in only a few iterations. Furthermore, our approach is able to learn key aspects of the discriminative loss itself. The proposed tracker sets a new state-of-the-art on 6 tracking benchmarks, achieving an EAO score of 0.440 on VOT2018, while running at over 40 FPS. The code and models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking.
The greatest challenge facing visual object tracking is the simultaneous requirements on robustness and discrimination power. In this paper, we propose a SiamFC-based tracker, named SPM-Tracker, to tackle this challenge. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate matching stages. Robustness is strengthened in the coarse matching (CM) stage through generalized training while discrimination power is enhanced in the fine matching (FM) stage through a distance learning network. The two stages are connected in series as the input proposals of the FM stage are generated by the CM stage. They are also connected in parallel as the matching scores and box location refinements are fused to generate the final results. This innovative series-parallel structure takes advantage of both stages and results in superior performance. The proposed SPM-Tracker, running at 120fps on GPU, achieves an AUC of 0.687 on OTB-100 and an EAO of 0.434 on VOT-16, exceeding other real-time trackers by a notable margin.
In this paper, we present a unified, end-to-end trainable spatiotemporal CNN model for VOS, which consists of two branches, i.e., the temporal coherence branch and the spatial segmentation branch. Specifically, the temporal coherence branch pretrained in an adversarial fashion from unlabeled video data, is designed to capture the dynamic appearance and motion cues of video sequences to guide object segmentation. The spatial segmentation branch focuses on segmenting objects accurately based on the learned appearance and motion cues. To obtain accurate segmentation results, we design a coarse-to-fine process to sequentially apply a designed attention module on multi-scale feature maps, and concatenate them to produce the final prediction. In this way, the spatial segmentation branch is enforced to gradually concentrate on object regions. These two branches are jointly fine-tuned on video segmentation sequences in an end-to-end manner. Several experiments are carried out on three challenging datasets (i.e., DAVIS-2016, DAVIS-2017 and Youtube-Object) to show that our method achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/longyin880815/STCNN.
In recent years visual object tracking has become a very active research area. An increasing number of tracking algorithms are being proposed each year. It is because tracking has wide applications in various real world problems such as human-computer interaction, autonomous vehicles, robotics, surveillance and security just to name a few. In the current study, we review latest trends and advances in the tracking area and evaluate the robustness of different trackers based on the feature extraction methods. The first part of this work comprises a comprehensive survey of the recently proposed trackers. We broadly categorize trackers into Correlation Filter based Trackers (CFTs) and Non-CFTs. Each category is further classified into various types based on the architecture and the tracking mechanism. In the second part, we experimentally evaluated 24 recent trackers for robustness, and compared handcrafted and deep feature based trackers. We observe that trackers using deep features performed better, though in some cases a fusion of both increased performance significantly. In order to overcome the drawbacks of the existing benchmarks, a new benchmark Object Tracking and Temple Color (OTTC) has also been proposed and used in the evaluation of different algorithms. We analyze the performance of trackers over eleven different challenges in OTTC, and three other benchmarks. Our study concludes that Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) based trackers perform better than the others. Our study also reveals that inclusion of different types of regularizations over DCF often results in boosted tracking performance. Finally, we sum up our study by pointing out some insights and indicating future trends in visual object tracking field.
Recently, we have seen a rapid development of Deep Neural Network (DNN) based visual tracking solutions. Some trackers combine the DNN-based solutions with Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) to extract semantic features and successfully deliver the state-of-the-art tracking accuracy. However, these solutions are highly compute-intensive, which require long processing time, resulting unsecured real-time performance. To deliver both high accuracy and reliable real-time performance, we propose a novel tracker called SiamVGG\footnote{https://github.com/leeyeehoo/SiamVGG}. It combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbone and a cross-correlation operator, and takes advantage of the features from exemplary images for more accurate object tracking. The architecture of SiamVGG is customized from VGG-16 with the parameters shared by both exemplary images and desired input video frames. We demonstrate the proposed SiamVGG on OTB-2013/50/100 and VOT 2015/2016/2017 datasets with the state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining a decent real-time performance of 50 FPS running on a GTX 1080Ti. Our design can achieve 2% higher Expected Average Overlap (EAO) compared to the ECO and C-COT in VOT2017 Challenge.
Siamese networks have drawn great attention in visual tracking because of their balanced accuracy and speed. However, the backbone networks used in Siamese trackers are relatively shallow, such as AlexNet [18], which does not fully take advantage of the capability of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage deeper and wider convolutional neural networks to enhance tracking robustness and accuracy. We observe that direct replacement of backbones with existing powerful architectures, such as ResNet [14] and Inception [33], does not bring improvements. The main reasons are that 1)large increases in the receptive field of neurons lead to reduced feature discriminability and localization precision; and 2) the network padding for convolutions induces a positional bias in learning. To address these issues, we propose new residual modules to eliminate the negative impact of padding, and further design new architectures using these modules with controlled receptive field size and network stride. The designed architectures are lightweight and guarantee real-time tracking speed when applied to SiamFC [2] and SiamRPN [20]. Experiments show that solely due to the proposed network architectures, our SiamFC+ and SiamRPN+ obtain up to 9.8%/5.7% (AUC), 23.3%/8.8% (EAO) and 24.4%/25.0% (EAO) relative improvements over the original versions [2, 20] on the OTB-15, VOT-16 and VOT-17 datasets, respectively.
Siamese network based trackers formulate tracking as convolutional feature cross-correlation between target template and searching region. However, Siamese trackers still have accuracy gap compared with state-of-the-art algorithms and they cannot take advantage of feature from deep networks, such as ResNet-50 or deeper. In this work we prove the core reason comes from the lack of strict translation invariance. By comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validations, we break this restriction through a simple yet effective spatial aware sampling strategy and successfully train a ResNet-driven Siamese tracker with significant performance gain. Moreover, we propose a new model architecture to perform depth-wise and layer-wise aggregations, which not only further improves the accuracy but also reduces the model size. We conduct extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker, which obtains currently the best results on four large tracking benchmarks, including OTB2015, VOT2018, UAV123, and LaSOT. Our model will be released to facilitate further studies based on this problem.
In this paper we illustrate how to perform both visual object tracking and semi-supervised video object segmentation, in real-time, with a single simple approach. Our method, dubbed SiamMask, improves the offline training procedure of popular fully-convolutional Siamese approaches for object tracking by augmenting their loss with a binary segmentation task. Once trained, SiamMask solely relies on a single bounding box initialisation and operates online, producing class-agnostic object segmentation masks and rotated bounding boxes at 55 frames per second. Despite its simplicity, versatility and fast speed, our strategy allows us to establish a new state of the art among real-time trackers on VOT-2018, while at the same time demonstrating competitive performance and the best speed for the semi-supervised video object segmentation task on DAVIS-2016 and DAVIS-2017. The project website is http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~qwang/SiamMask.
For visual tracking, most of the traditional correlation filters (CF) based methods suffer from the bottleneck of feature redundancy and lack of motion information. In this paper, we design a novel tracking framework, called multi-hierarchical independent correlation filters (MHIT). The framework consists of motion estimation module, hierarchical features selection, independent CF online learning, and adaptive multi-branch CF fusion. Specifically, the motion estimation module is introduced to capture motion information, which effectively alleviates the object partial occlusion in the temporal video. The multi-hierarchical deep features of CNN representing different semantic information can be fully excavated to track multi-scale objects. To better overcome the deep feature redundancy, each hierarchical features are independently fed into a single branch to implement the online learning of parameters. Finally, an adaptive weight scheme is integrated into the framework to fuse these independent multi-branch CFs for the better and more robust visual object tracking. Extensive experiments on OTB and VOT datasets show that the proposed MHIT tracker can significantly improve the tracking performance. Especially, it obtains a 20.1% relative performance gain compared to the top trackers on the VOT2017 challenge, and also achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the VOT2018 challenge.
It remains a huge challenge to design effective and efficient trackers under complex scenarios, including occlusions, illumination changes and pose variations. To cope with this problem, a promising solution is to integrate the temporal consistency across consecutive frames and multiple feature cues in a unified model. Motivated by this idea, we propose a novel correlation filter-based tracker in this work, in which the temporal relatedness is reconciled under a multi-task learning framework and the multiple feature cues are modeled using a multi-view learning approach. We demonstrate the resulting regression model can be efficiently learned by exploiting the structure of blockwise diagonal matrix. A fast blockwise diagonal matrix inversion algorithm is developed thereafter for efficient online tracking. Meanwhile, we incorporate an adaptive scale estimation mechanism to strengthen the stability of scale variation tracking. We implement our tracker using two types of features and test it on two benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach when compared with other state-of-the-art trackers. project homepage http://bmal.hust.edu.cn/project/KMF2JMTtracking.html
While recent years have witnessed astonishing improvements in visual tracking robustness, the advancements in tracking accuracy have been limited. As the focus has been directed towards the development of powerful classifiers, the problem of accurate target state estimation has been largely overlooked. In fact, most trackers resort to a simple multi-scale search in order to estimate the target bounding box. We argue that this approach is fundamentally limited since target estimation is a complex task, requiring high-level knowledge about the object. We address this problem by proposing a novel tracking architecture, consisting of dedicated target estimation and classification components. High level knowledge is incorporated into the target estimation through extensive offline learning. Our target estimation component is trained to predict the overlap between the target object and an estimated bounding box. By carefully integrating target-specific information, our approach achieves previously unseen bounding box accuracy. We further introduce a classification component that is trained online to guarantee high discriminative power in the presence of distractors. Our final tracking framework sets a new state-of-the-art on five challenging benchmarks. On the new large-scale TrackingNet dataset, our tracker ATOM achieves a relative gain of 15% over the previous best approach, while running at over 30 FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking.
Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has attracted much attention in different areas of computer vision, due to its powerful abstract feature representation. Visual object tracking is one of the interesting and important areas in computer vision that achieves remarkable improvements in recent years. In this work, we aim to improve both the motion and observation models in visual object tracking by leveraging representation power of CNNs. To this end, a motion estimation network (named MEN) is utilized to seek the most likely locations of the target and prepare a further clue in addition to the previous target position. Hence the motion estimation would be enhanced by generating a small number of candidates near two plausible positions. The generated candidates are then fed into a trained Siamese network to detect the most probable candidate. Each candidate is compared to an adaptable buffer, which is updated under a predefined condition. To take into account the target appearance changes, a weighting CNN (called WCNN) adaptively assigns weights to the final similarity scores of the Siamese network using sequence-specific information. Evaluation results on well-known benchmark datasets (OTB100, OTB50 and OTB2013) prove that the proposed tracker outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.
What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward from a counterfactual policy. Our estimators are shown to have lowest variance in a wide class of estimators, achieving variance reduction relative to standard estimators. We then apply our estimators to improve advertisement design by a major advertisement company. Consistent with the theoretical result, our estimators allow us to improve on the existing bandit algorithm with more statistical confidence compared to a state-of-the-art benchmark.
Learning long-term spatial-temporal features are critical for many video analysis tasks. However, existing video segmentation methods predominantly rely on static image segmentation techniques, and methods capturing temporal dependency for segmentation have to depend on pretrained optical flow models, leading to suboptimal solutions for the problem. End-to-end sequential learning to explore spatial-temporal features for video segmentation is largely limited by the scale of available video segmentation datasets, i.e., even the largest video segmentation dataset only contains 90 short video clips. To solve this problem, we build a new large-scale video object segmentation dataset called YouTube Video Object Segmentation dataset (YouTube-VOS). Our dataset contains 3,252 YouTube video clips and 78 categories including common objects and human activities. This is by far the largest video object segmentation dataset to our knowledge and we have released it at https://youtube-vos.org. Based on this dataset, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence network to fully exploit long-term spatial-temporal information in videos for segmentation. We demonstrate that our method is able to achieve the best results on our YouTube-VOS test set and comparable results on DAVIS 2016 compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. Experiments show that the large scale dataset is indeed a key factor to the success of our model.
Recently, Siamese network based trackers have received tremendous interest for their fast tracking speed and high performance. Despite the great success, this tracking framework still suffers from several limitations. First, it cannot properly handle large object rotation. Second, tracking gets easily distracted when the background contains salient objects. In this paper, we propose two simple yet effective mechanisms, namely angle estimation and spatial masking, to address these issues. The objective is to extract more representative features so that a better match can be obtained between the same object from different frames. The resulting tracker, named Siam-BM, not only significantly improves the tracking performance, but more importantly maintains the realtime capability. Evaluations on the VOT2017 dataset show that Siam-BM achieves an EAO of 0.335, which makes it the best-performing realtime tracker to date.
Recently, Siamese networks have drawn great attention in visual tracking community because of their balanced accuracy and speed. However, features used in most Siamese tracking approaches can only discriminate foreground from the non-semantic backgrounds. The semantic backgrounds are always considered as distractors, which hinders the robustness of Siamese trackers. In this paper, we focus on learning distractor-aware Siamese networks for accurate and long-term tracking. To this end, features used in traditional Siamese trackers are analyzed at first. We observe that the imbalanced distribution of training data makes the learned features less discriminative. During the off-line training phase, an effective sampling strategy is introduced to control this distribution and make the model focus on the semantic distractors. During inference, a novel distractor-aware module is designed to perform incremental learning, which can effectively transfer the general embedding to the current video domain. In addition, we extend the proposed approach for long-term tracking by introducing a simple yet effective local-to-global search region strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, yielding 9.6% relative gain in VOT2016 dataset and 35.9% relative gain in UAV20L dataset. The proposed tracker can perform at 160 FPS on short-term benchmarks and 110 FPS on long-term benchmarks.
Model update lies at the heart of object tracking. Generally, model update is formulated as an online learning problem where a target model is learned over the online training set. Our key innovation is to \emph{formulate the model update problem in the meta-learning framework and learn the online learning algorithm itself using large numbers of offline videos}, i.e., \emph{learning to update}. The learned updater takes as input the online training set and outputs an updated target model. As a first attempt, we design the learned updater based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and demonstrate its application in a template-based tracker and a correlation filter-based tracker. Our learned updater consistently improves the base trackers and runs faster than realtime on GPU while requiring small memory footprint during testing. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our learned updater outperforms commonly used update baselines including the efficient exponential moving average (EMA)-based update and the well-designed stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-based update. Equipped with our learned updater, the template-based tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance among realtime trackers on GPU.