Deep neural networks, albeit their great success on feature learning in various computer vision tasks, are usually considered as impractical for online visual tracking because they require very long training time and a large number of training samples. In this work, we present an efficient and very robust tracking algorithm using a single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for learning effective feature representations of the target object, in a purely online manner. Our contributions are multifold: First, we introduce a novel truncated structural loss function that maintains as many training samples as possible and reduces the risk of tracking error accumulation. Second, we enhance the ordinary Stochastic Gradient Descent approach in CNN training with a robust sample selection mechanism. The sampling mechanism randomly generates positive and negative samples from different temporal distributions, which are generated by taking the temporal relations and label noise into account. Finally, a lazy yet effective updating scheme is designed for CNN training. Equipped with this novel updating algorithm, the CNN model is robust to some long-existing difficulties in visual tracking such as occlusion or incorrect detections, without loss of the effective adaption for significant appearance changes. In the experiment, our CNN tracker outperforms all compared state-of-the-art methods on two recently proposed benchmarks which in total involve over 60 video sequences. The remarkable performance improvement over the existing trackers illustrates the superiority of the feature representations which are learned
We propose an online visual tracking algorithm by learning discriminative saliency map using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Given a CNN pre-trained on a large-scale image repository in offline, our algorithm takes outputs from hidden layers of the network as feature descriptors since they show excellent representation performance in various general visual recognition problems. The features are used to learn discriminative target appearance models using an online Support Vector Machine (SVM). In addition, we construct target-specific saliency map by backpropagating CNN features with guidance of the SVM, and obtain the final tracking result in each frame based on the appearance model generatively constructed with the saliency map. Since the saliency map visualizes spatial configuration of target effectively, it improves target localization accuracy and enable us to achieve pixel-level target segmentation. We verify the effectiveness of our tracking algorithm through extensive experiment on a challenging benchmark, where our method illustrates outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms.
Several benchmark datasets for visual tracking research have been proposed in recent years. Despite their usefulness, whether they are sufficient for understanding and diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of different trackers remains questionable. To address this issue, we propose a framework by breaking a tracker down into five constituent parts, namely, motion model, feature extractor, observation model, model updater, and ensemble post-processor. We then conduct ablative experiments on each component to study how it affects the overall result. Surprisingly, our findings are discrepant with some common beliefs in the visual tracking research community. We find that the feature extractor plays the most important role in a tracker. On the other hand, although the observation model is the focus of many studies, we find that it often brings no significant improvement. Moreover, the motion model and model updater contain many details that could affect the result. Also, the ensemble post-processor can improve the result substantially when the constituent trackers have high diversity. Based on our findings, we put together some very elementary building blocks to give a basic tracker which is competitive in performance to the state-of-the-art trackers. We believe our framework can provide a solid baseline when conducting controlled experiments for visual tracking research.
Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have demonstrated great success in various computer vision tasks including image classification and object detection. However, some equally important tasks such as visual tracking remain relatively unexplored. We believe that a major hurdle that hinders the application of CNN to visual tracking is the lack of properly labeled training data. While existing applications that liberate the power of CNN often need an enormous amount of training data in the order of millions, visual tracking applications typically have only one labeled example in the first frame of each video. We address this research issue here by pre-training a CNN offline and then transferring the rich feature hierarchies learned to online tracking. The CNN is also fine-tuned during online tracking to adapt to the appearance of the tracked target specified in the first video frame. To fit the characteristics of object tracking, we first pre-train the CNN to recognize what is an object, and then propose to generate a probability map instead of producing a simple class label. Using two challenging open benchmarks for performance evaluation, our proposed tracker has demonstrated substantial improvement over other state-of-the-art trackers.
In this paper, we propose a visual tracker based on a metric-weighted linear representation of appearance. In order to capture the interdependence of different feature dimensions, we develop two online distance metric learning methods using proximity comparison information and structured output learning. The learned metric is then incorporated into a linear representation of appearance. We show that online distance metric learning significantly improves the robustness of the tracker, especially on those sequences exhibiting drastic appearance changes. In order to bound growth in the number of training samples, we design a time-weighted reservoir sampling method. Moreover, we enable our tracker to automatically perform object identification during the process of object tracking, by introducing a collection of static template samples belonging to several object classes of interest. Object identification results for an entire video sequence are achieved by systematically combining the tracking information and visual recognition at each frame. Experimental results on challenging video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for both inter-frame tracking and object identification.
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) recently provides an appealing way to alleviate the drifting problem in visual tracking. Following the tracking-by-detection framework, an online MILBoost approach is developed that sequentially chooses weak classifiers by maximizing the bag likelihood. In this paper, we extend this idea towards incorporating the instance significance estimation into the online MILBoost framework. First, instead of treating all instances equally, with each instance we associate a significance-coefficient that represents its contribution to the bag likelihood. The coefficients are estimated by a simple Bayesian formula that jointly considers the predictions from several standard MILBoost classifiers. Next, we follow the online boosting framework, and propose a new criterion for the selection of weak classifiers. Experiments with challenging public datasets show that the proposed method outperforms both existing MIL based and boosting based trackers.
Deep networks have been successfully applied to visual tracking by learning a generic representation offline from numerous training images. However the offline training is time-consuming and the learned generic representation may be less discriminative for tracking specific objects. In this paper we present that, even without offline training with a large amount of auxiliary data, simple two-layer convolutional networks can be powerful enough to develop a robust representation for visual tracking. In the first frame, we employ the k-means algorithm to extract a set of normalized patches from the target region as fixed filters, which integrate a series of adaptive contextual filters surrounding the target to define a set of feature maps in the subsequent frames. These maps measure similarities between each filter and the useful local intensity patterns across the target, thereby encoding its local structural information. Furthermore, all the maps form together a global representation, which is built on mid-level features, thereby remaining close to image-level information, and hence the inner geometric layout of the target is also well preserved. A simple soft shrinkage method with an adaptive threshold is employed to de-noise the global representation, resulting in a robust sparse representation. The representation is updated via a simple and effective online strategy, allowing it to robustly adapt to target appearance variations. Our convolution networks have surprisingly lightweight structure, yet perform favorably against several state-of-the-art methods on the CVPR2013 tracking benchmark dataset with 50 challenging videos.
One of the crucial problems in visual tracking is how the object is represented. Conventional appearance-based trackers are using increasingly more complex features in order to be robust. However, complex representations typically not only require more computation for feature extraction, but also make the state inference complicated. We show that with a careful feature selection scheme, extremely simple yet discriminative features can be used for robust object tracking. The central component of the proposed method is a succinct and discriminative representation of the object using discriminative non-orthogonal binary subspace (DNBS) which is spanned by Haar-like features. The DNBS representation inherits the merits of the original NBS in that it efficiently describes the object. It also incorporates the discriminative information to distinguish foreground from background. However, the problem of finding the DNBS bases from an over-complete dictionary is NP-hard. We propose a greedy algorithm called discriminative optimized orthogonal matching pursuit (D-OOMP) to solve this problem. An iterative formulation named iterative D-OOMP is further developed to drastically reduce the redundant computation between iterations and a hierarchical selection strategy is integrated for reducing the search space of features. The proposed DNBS representation is applied to object tracking through SSD-based template matching. We validate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on challenging videos with comparisons against several state-of-the-art trackers and demonstrate its capability to track objects in clutter and moving background.
Multiple-instance learning (MIL) has served as an important tool for a wide range of vision applications, for instance, image classification, object detection, and visual tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel method to solve the classical MIL problem, named relaxed multiple-instance SVM (RMI-SVM). We treat the positiveness of instance as a continuous variable, use Noisy-OR model to enforce the MIL constraints, and jointly optimize the bag label and instance label in a unified framework. The optimization problem can be efficiently solved using stochastic gradient decent. The extensive experiments demonstrate that RMI-SVM consistently achieves superior performance on various benchmarks for MIL. Moreover, we simply applied RMI-SVM to a challenging vision task, common object discovery. The state-of-the-art results of object discovery on Pascal VOC datasets further confirm the advantages of the proposed method.
Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual representations. Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision. That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other tasks such as surface-normal estimation.
This paper presents a novel object tracking method based on approximated Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC). Rather than using a non-negativity constraint on encoding coefficients to guarantee these elements nonnegative, in this paper, the non-negativity constraint is substituted for a conventional $\ell_2$ norm regularization term in approximated LLC to obtain the similar nonnegative effect. And we provide a detailed and adequate explanation in theoretical analysis to clarify the rationality of this replacement. Instead of specifying fixed K nearest neighbors to construct the local dictionary, a series of different dictionaries with pre-defined numbers of nearest neighbors are selected. Weights of these various dictionaries are also learned from approximated LLC in the similar framework. In order to alleviate tracking drifts, we propose a simple and efficient occlusion detection method. The occlusion detection criterion mainly depends on whether negative templates are selected to represent the severe occluded target. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on several challenging sequences show that the proposed tracking algorithm achieves favorable performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we propose and study a novel visual object tracking approach based on convolutional networks and recurrent networks. The proposed approach is distinct from the existing approaches to visual object tracking, such as filtering-based ones and tracking-by-detection ones, in the sense that the tracking system is explicitly trained off-line to track anonymous objects in a noisy environment. The proposed visual tracking model is end-to-end trainable, minimizing any adversarial effect from mismatches in object representation and between the true underlying dynamics and learning dynamics. We empirically show that the proposed tracking approach works well in various scenarios by generating artificial video sequences with varying conditions; the number of objects, amount of noise and the match between the training shapes and test shapes.
In this paper, we study a discriminatively trained deep convolutional network for the task of visual tracking. Our tracker utilizes both motion and appearance features that are extracted from a pre-trained dual stream deep convolution network. We show that the features extracted from our dual-stream network can provide rich information about the target and this leads to competitive performance against state of the art tracking methods on a visual tracking benchmark.
We propose a novel visual tracking algorithm based on the representations from a discriminatively trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation. Our network is composed of shared layers and multiple branches of domain-specific layers, where domains correspond to individual training sequences and each branch is responsible for binary classification to identify the target in each domain. We train the network with respect to each domain iteratively to obtain generic target representations in the shared layers. When tracking a target in a new sequence, we construct a new network by combining the shared layers in the pretrained CNN with a new binary classification layer, which is updated online. Online tracking is performed by evaluating the candidate windows randomly sampled around the previous target state. The proposed algorithm illustrates outstanding performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in existing tracking benchmarks.
The establishment of robust target appearance model over time is an overriding concern in visual tracking. In this paper, we propose an inverse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method for robust appearance modeling. Rather than using a linear combination of nonnegative basis matrices for each target image patch in the conventional NMF, the proposed method is a reverse thought to conventional NMF tracker. It utilizes both the foreground and background information, and imposes a local coordinate constraint, where the basis matrix is sparse matrix from the linear combination of candidates with corresponding nonnegative coefficient vectors. Inverse NMF is used as a feature encoder, where the resulting coefficient vectors are fed into a SVM classifier for separating the target from the background. The proposed method is tested on several videos and compared with seven state-of-the-art methods. Our results have provided further support to the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
Sampling and budgeting training examples are two essential factors in tracking algorithms based on support vector machines (SVMs) as a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recently, the circulant matrix formed by dense sampling of translated image patches has been utilized in correlation filters for fast tracking. In this paper, we derive an equivalent formulation of a SVM model with circulant matrix expression and present an efficient alternating optimization method for visual tracking. We incorporate the discrete Fourier transform with the proposed alternating optimization process, and pose the tracking problem as an iterative learning of support correlation filters (SCFs) which find the global optimal solution with real-time performance. For a given circulant data matrix with n^2 samples of size n*n, the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(n^2*logn) whereas that of the standard SVM-based approaches is at least O(n^4). In addition, we extend the SCF-based tracking algorithm with multi-channel features, kernel functions, and scale-adaptive approaches to further improve the tracking performance. Experimental results on a large benchmark dataset show that the proposed SCF-based algorithms perform favorably against the state-of-the-art tracking methods in terms of accuracy and speed.
In this paper, we propose a novel visual tracking framework that intelligently discovers reliable patterns from a wide range of video to resist drift error for long-term tracking tasks. First, we design a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) based tracker which is able to exploit a large number of tracked samples while still ensures real-time performance. Second, we propose a clustering method with temporal constraints to explore and memorize consistent patterns from previous frames, named as reliable memories. By virtue of this method, our tracker can utilize uncontaminated information to alleviate drifting issues. Experimental results show that our tracker performs favorably against other state of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, it is significantly competent in handling drifts and able to robustly track challenging long videos over 4000 frames, while most of others lose track at early frames.
This paper proposes a novel framework to alleviate the model drift problem in visual tracking, which is based on paced updates and trajectory selection. Given a base tracker, an ensemble of trackers is generated, in which each tracker's update behavior will be paced and then traces the target object forward and backward to generate a pair of trajectories in an interval. Then, we implicitly perform self-examination based on trajectory pair of each tracker and select the most robust tracker. The proposed framework can effectively leverage temporal context of sequential frames and avoid to learn corrupted information. Extensive experiments on the standard benchmark suggest that the proposed framework achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art trackers.
The goal of this paper is to present a non-iterative and more importantly an extremely fast algorithm to reconstruct images from compressively sensed (CS) random measurements. To this end, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture which takes in CS measurements of an image as input and outputs an intermediate reconstruction. We call this network, ReconNet. The intermediate reconstruction is fed into an off-the-shelf denoiser to obtain the final reconstructed image. On a standard dataset of images we show significant improvements in reconstruction results (both in terms of PSNR and time complexity) over state-of-the-art iterative CS reconstruction algorithms at various measurement rates. Further, through qualitative experiments on real data collected using our block single pixel camera (SPC), we show that our network is highly robust to sensor noise and can recover visually better quality images than competitive algorithms at extremely low sensing rates of 0.1 and 0.04. To demonstrate that our algorithm can recover semantically informative images even at a low measurement rate of 0.01, we present a very robust proof of concept real-time visual tracking application.
The problem of visual tracking evaluation is sporting a large variety of performance measures, and largely suffers from lack of consensus about which measures should be used in experiments. This makes the cross-paper tracker comparison difficult. Furthermore, as some measures may be less effective than others, the tracking results may be skewed or biased towards particular tracking aspects. In this paper we revisit the popular performance measures and tracker performance visualizations and analyze them theoretically and experimentally. We show that several measures are equivalent from the point of information they provide for tracker comparison and, crucially, that some are more brittle than the others. Based on our analysis we narrow down the set of potential measures to only two complementary ones, describing accuracy and robustness, thus pushing towards homogenization of the tracker evaluation methodology. These two measures can be intuitively interpreted and visualized and have been employed by the recent Visual Object Tracking (VOT) challenges as the foundation for the evaluation methodology.