Current event-/frame-event based trackers undergo evaluation on short-term tracking datasets, however, the tracking of real-world scenarios involves long-term tracking, and the performance of existing tracking algorithms in these scenarios remains unclear. In this paper, we first propose a new long-term and large-scale frame-event single object tracking dataset, termed FELT. It contains 742 videos and 1,594,474 RGB frames and event stream pairs and has become the largest frame-event tracking dataset to date. We re-train and evaluate 15 baseline trackers on our dataset for future works to compare. More importantly, we find that the RGB frames and event streams are naturally incomplete due to the influence of challenging factors and spatially sparse event flow. In response to this, we propose a novel associative memory Transformer network as a unified backbone by introducing modern Hopfield layers into multi-head self-attention blocks to fuse both RGB and event data. Extensive experiments on RGB-Event (FELT), RGB-Thermal (RGBT234, LasHeR), and RGB-Depth (DepthTrack) datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our model. The dataset and source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/FELT_SOT_Benchmark}.
Flexible endoscope motion tracking and analysis in mechanical simulators have proven useful for endoscopy training. Common motion tracking methods based on electromagnetic tracker are however limited by their high cost and material susceptibility. In this work, the motion-guided dual-camera vision tracker is proposed to provide robust and accurate tracking of the endoscope tip's 3D position. The tracker addresses several unique challenges of tracking flexible endoscope tip inside a dynamic, life-sized mechanical simulator. To address the appearance variation and keep dual-camera tracking consistency, the cross-camera mutual template strategy (CMT) is proposed by introducing dynamic transient mutual templates. To alleviate large occlusion and light-induced distortion, the Mamba-based motion-guided prediction head (MMH) is presented to aggregate historical motion with visual tracking. The proposed tracker achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art vision trackers, achieving 42% and 72% improvements against the second-best method in average error and maximum error. Further motion analysis involving novice and expert endoscopists also shows that the tip 3D motion provided by the proposed tracker enables more reliable motion analysis and more substantial differentiation between different expertise levels, compared with other trackers.
Current multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to predict trajectories of targets (i.e., ''where'') in videos. Yet, knowing merely ''where'' is insufficient in many crucial applications. In comparison, semantic understanding such as fine-grained behaviors, interactions, and overall summarized captions (i.e., ''what'') from videos, associated with ''where'', is highly-desired for comprehensive video analysis. Thus motivated, we introduce Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT), that aims to estimate object trajectories and meanwhile understand semantic details of associated trajectories including instance captions, instance interactions, and overall video captions, integrating ''where'' and ''what'' for tracking. In order to foster the exploration of SMOT, we propose BenSMOT, a large-scale Benchmark for Semantic MOT. Specifically, BenSMOT comprises 3,292 videos with 151K frames, covering various scenarios for semantic tracking of humans. BenSMOT provides annotations for the trajectories of targets, along with associated instance captions in natural language, instance interactions, and overall caption for each video sequence. To our best knowledge, BenSMOT is the first publicly available benchmark for SMOT. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a novel tracker named SMOTer, which is specially designed and end-to-end trained for SMOT, showing promising performance. By releasing BenSMOT, we expect to go beyond conventional MOT by predicting ''where'' and ''what'' for SMOT, opening up a new direction in tracking for video understanding. We will release BenSMOT and SMOTer at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/SMOTer.
This paper presents a novel multi-modal Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) algorithm for self-driving cars that combines camera and LiDAR data. Camera frames are processed with a state-of-the-art 3D object detector, whereas classical clustering techniques are used to process LiDAR observations. The proposed MOT algorithm comprises a three-step association process, an Extended Kalman filter for estimating the motion of each detected dynamic obstacle, and a track management phase. The EKF motion model requires the current measured relative position and orientation of the observed object and the longitudinal and angular velocities of the ego vehicle as inputs. Unlike most state-of-the-art multi-modal MOT approaches, the proposed algorithm does not rely on maps or knowledge of the ego global pose. Moreover, it uses a 3D detector exclusively for cameras and is agnostic to the type of LiDAR sensor used. The algorithm is validated both in simulation and with real-world data, with satisfactory results.
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a critical area within computer vision, with a broad spectrum of practical implementations. Current research has primarily focused on the development of tracking algorithms and enhancement of post-processing techniques. Yet, there has been a lack of thorough examination concerning the nature of tracking data it self. In this study, we pioneer an exploration into the distribution patterns of tracking data and identify a pronounced long-tail distribution issue within existing MOT datasets. We note a significant imbalance in the distribution of trajectory lengths across different pedestrians, a phenomenon we refer to as ``pedestrians trajectory long-tail distribution''. Addressing this challenge, we introduce a bespoke strategy designed to mitigate the effects of this skewed distribution. Specifically, we propose two data augmentation strategies, including Stationary Camera View Data Augmentation (SVA) and Dynamic Camera View Data Augmentation (DVA) , designed for viewpoint states and the Group Softmax (GS) module for Re-ID. SVA is to backtrack and predict the pedestrian trajectory of tail classes, and DVA is to use diffusion model to change the background of the scene. GS divides the pedestrians into unrelated groups and performs softmax operation on each group individually. Our proposed strategies can be integrated into numerous existing tracking systems, and extensive experimentation validates the efficacy of our method in reducing the influence of long-tail distribution on multi-object tracking performance. The code is available at https://github.com/chen-si-jia/Trajectory-Long-tail-Distribution-for-MOT.
In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, dubbed VastTrack, towards facilitating the development of more general visual tracking via encompassing abundant classes and videos. VastTrack possesses several attractive properties: (1) Vast Object Category. In particular, it covers target objects from 2,115 classes, largely surpassing object categories of existing popular benchmarks (e.g., GOT-10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). With such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking. (2) Larger scale. Compared with current benchmarks, VastTrack offers 50,610 sequences with 4.2 million frames, which makes it to date the largest benchmark regarding the number of videos, and thus could benefit training even more powerful visual trackers in the deep learning era. (3) Rich Annotation. Besides conventional bounding box annotations, VastTrack also provides linguistic descriptions for the videos. The rich annotations of VastTrack enables development of both the vision-only and the vision-language tracking. To ensure precise annotation, all videos are manually labeled with multiple rounds of careful inspection and refinement. To understand performance of existing trackers and to provide baselines for future comparison, we extensively assess 25 representative trackers. The results, not surprisingly, show significant drops compared to those on current datasets due to lack of abundant categories and videos from diverse scenarios for training, and more efforts are required to improve general tracking. Our VastTrack and all the evaluation results will be made publicly available https://github.com/HengLan/VastTrack.
Accurate data association is crucial in reducing confusion, such as ID switches and assignment errors, in multi-object tracking (MOT). However, existing advanced methods often overlook the diversity among trajectories and the ambiguity and conflicts present in motion and appearance cues, leading to confusion among detections, trajectories, and associations when performing simple global data association. To address this issue, we propose a simple, versatile, and highly interpretable data association approach called Decomposed Data Association (DDA). DDA decomposes the traditional association problem into multiple sub-problems using a series of non-learning-based modules and selectively addresses the confusion in each sub-problem by incorporating targeted exploitation of new cues. Additionally, we introduce Occlusion-aware Non-Maximum Suppression (ONMS) to retain more occluded detections, thereby increasing opportunities for association with trajectories and indirectly reducing the confusion caused by missed detections. Finally, based on DDA and ONMS, we design a powerful multi-object tracker named DeconfuseTrack, specifically focused on resolving confusion in MOT. Extensive experiments conducted on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets demonstrate that our proposed DDA and ONMS significantly enhance the performance of several popular trackers. Moreover, DeconfuseTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MOT17 and MOT20 test sets, significantly outperforms the baseline tracker ByteTrack in metrics such as HOTA, IDF1, AssA. This validates that our tracking design effectively reduces confusion caused by simple global association.
In Multiple Object Tracking, objects often exhibit non-linear motion of acceleration and deceleration, with irregular direction changes. Tacking-by-detection (TBD) trackers with Kalman Filter motion prediction work well in pedestrian-dominant scenarios but fall short in complex situations when multiple objects perform non-linear and diverse motion simultaneously. To tackle the complex non-linear motion, we propose a real-time diffusion-based MOT approach named DiffMOT. Specifically, for the motion predictor component, we propose a novel Decoupled Diffusion-based Motion Predictor (D$^2$MP). It models the entire distribution of various motion presented by the data as a whole. It also predicts an individual object's motion conditioning on an individual's historical motion information. Furthermore, it optimizes the diffusion process with much fewer sampling steps. As a MOT tracker, the DiffMOT is real-time at 22.7FPS, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art on DanceTrack and SportsMOT datasets with $62.3\%$ and $76.2\%$ in HOTA metrics, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, DiffMOT is the first to introduce a diffusion probabilistic model into the MOT to tackle non-linear motion prediction.
In the realm of computer vision and graphics, accurately establishing correspondences between geometric 3D shapes is pivotal for applications like object tracking, registration, texture transfer, and statistical shape analysis. Moving beyond traditional hand-crafted and data-driven feature learning methods, we incorporate spectral methods with deep learning, focusing on functional maps (FMs) and optimal transport (OT). Traditional OT-based approaches, often reliant on entropy regularization OT in learning-based framework, face computational challenges due to their quadratic cost. Our key contribution is to employ the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for OT, which is a valid fast optimal transport metric in an unsupervised shape matching framework. This unsupervised framework integrates functional map regularizers with a novel OT-based loss derived from SWD, enhancing feature alignment between shapes treated as discrete probability measures. We also introduce an adaptive refinement process utilizing entropy regularized OT, further refining feature alignments for accurate point-to-point correspondences. Our method demonstrates superior performance in non-rigid shape matching, including near-isometric and non-isometric scenarios, and excels in downstream tasks like segmentation transfer. The empirical results on diverse datasets highlight our framework's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, setting new standards in non-rigid shape matching with efficient OT metrics and an adaptive refinement module.
In robotics, motion capture systems have been widely used to measure the accuracy of localization algorithms. Moreover, this infrastructure can also be used for other computer vision tasks, such as the evaluation of Visual (-Inertial) SLAM dynamic initialization, multi-object tracking, or automatic annotation. Yet, to work optimally, these functionalities require having accurate and reliable spatial-temporal calibration parameters between the camera and the global pose sensor. In this study, we provide two novel solutions to estimate these calibration parameters. Firstly, we design an offline target-based method with high accuracy and consistency. Spatial-temporal parameters, camera intrinsic, and trajectory are optimized simultaneously. Then, we propose an online target-less method, eliminating the need for a calibration target and enabling the estimation of time-varying spatial-temporal parameters. Additionally, we perform detailed observability analysis for the target-less method. Our theoretical findings regarding observability are validated by simulation experiments and provide explainable guidelines for calibration. Finally, the accuracy and consistency of two proposed methods are evaluated with hand-held real-world datasets where traditional hand-eye calibration method do not work.
This paper introduces the task of Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking (AR-MOT), which dynamically tracks specific objects in a video sequence based on audio expressions and appears as a challenging problem in autonomous driving. Due to the lack of semantic modeling capacity in audio and video, existing works have mainly focused on text-based multi-object tracking, which often comes at the cost of tracking quality, interaction efficiency, and even the safety of assistance systems, limiting the application of such methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we delve into the problem of AR-MOT from the perspective of audio-video fusion and audio-video tracking. We put forward EchoTrack, an end-to-end AR-MOT framework with dual-stream vision transformers. The dual streams are intertwined with our Bidirectional Frequency-domain Cross-attention Fusion Module (Bi-FCFM), which bidirectionally fuses audio and video features from both frequency- and spatiotemporal domains. Moreover, we propose the Audio-visual Contrastive Tracking Learning (ACTL) regime to extract homogeneous semantic features between expressions and visual objects by learning homogeneous features between different audio and video objects effectively. Aside from the architectural design, we establish the first set of large-scale AR-MOT benchmarks, including Echo-KITTI, Echo-KITTI+, and Echo-BDD. Extensive experiments on the established benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EchoTrack and its components. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lab206/EchoTrack.
Adversarial attacks in visual object tracking have significantly degraded the performance of advanced trackers by introducing imperceptible perturbations into images. However, there is still a lack of research on designing adversarial defense methods for object tracking. To address these issues, we propose an effective auxiliary pre-processing defense network, AADN, which performs defensive transformations on the input images before feeding them into the tracker. Moreover, it can be seamlessly integrated with other visual trackers as a plug-and-play module without parameter adjustments. We train AADN using adversarial training, specifically employing Dua-Loss to generate adversarial samples that simultaneously attack the classification and regression branches of the tracker. Extensive experiments conducted on the OTB100, LaSOT, and VOT2018 benchmarks demonstrate that AADN maintains excellent defense robustness against adversarial attack methods in both adaptive and non-adaptive attack scenarios. Moreover, when transferring the defense network to heterogeneous trackers, it exhibits reliable transferability. Finally, AADN achieves a processing time of up to 5ms/frame, allowing seamless integration with existing high-speed trackers without introducing significant computational overhead.
Deep learning-based methods monopolize the latest research in the field of thermal infrared (TIR) object tracking. However, relying solely on deep learning models to obtain better tracking results requires carefully selecting feature information that is beneficial to representing the target object and designing a reasonable template update strategy, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of model design. Thus, recent TIR tracking methods face many challenges in complex scenarios. This paper introduces a novel Deep Bayesian Filtering (DBF) method to enhance TIR tracking in these challenging situations. DBF is distinctive in its dual-model structure: the system and observation models. The system model leverages motion data to estimate the potential positions of the target object based on two-dimensional Brownian motion, thus generating a prior probability. Following this, the observation model comes into play upon capturing the TIR image. It serves as a classifier and employs infrared information to ascertain the likelihood of these estimated positions, creating a likelihood probability. According to the guidance of the two models, the position of the target object can be determined, and the template can be dynamically updated. Experimental analysis across several benchmark datasets reveals that DBF achieves competitive performance, surpassing most existing TIR tracking methods in complex scenarios.
We propose a new visual hierarchical representation paradigm for multi-object tracking. It is more effective to discriminate between objects by attending to objects' compositional visual regions and contrasting with the background contextual information instead of sticking to only the semantic visual cue such as bounding boxes. This compositional-semantic-contextual hierarchy is flexible to be integrated in different appearance-based multi-object tracking methods. We also propose an attention-based visual feature module to fuse the hierarchical visual representations. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and time efficiency among query-based methods on multiple multi-object tracking benchmarks.
3D single object tracking (SOT) is an important and challenging task for the autonomous driving and mobile robotics. Most existing methods perform tracking between two consecutive frames while ignoring the motion patterns of the target over a series of frames, which would cause performance degradation in the scenes with sparse points. To break through this limitation, we introduce Sequence-to-Sequence tracking paradigm and a tracker named SeqTrack3D to capture target motion across continuous frames. Unlike previous methods that primarily adopted three strategies: matching two consecutive point clouds, predicting relative motion, or utilizing sequential point clouds to address feature degradation, our SeqTrack3D combines both historical point clouds and bounding box sequences. This novel method ensures robust tracking by leveraging location priors from historical boxes, even in scenes with sparse points. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale datasets show that SeqTrack3D achieves new state-of-the-art performances, improving by 6.00% on NuScenes and 14.13% on Waymo dataset. The code will be made public at https://github.com/aron-lin/seqtrack3d.
This paper focuses on a real-time vehicle detection and urban traffic behavior analysis system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) traffic video. By using UAV to collect traffic data and combining the YOLOv8 model and SORT tracking algorithm, the object detection and tracking functions are implemented on the iOS mobile platform. For the problem of traffic data acquisition and analysis, the dynamic computing method is used to process the performance in real time and calculate the micro and macro traffic parameters of the vehicles, and real-time traffic behavior analysis is conducted and visualized. The experiment results reveals that the vehicle object detection can reach 98.27% precision rate and 87.93% recall rate, and the real-time processing capacity is stable at 30 frames per seconds. This work integrates drone technology, iOS development, and deep learning techniques to integrate traffic video acquisition, object detection, object tracking, and traffic behavior analysis functions on mobile devices. It provides new possibilities for lightweight traffic information collection and data analysis, and offers innovative solutions to improve the efficiency of analyzing road traffic conditions and addressing transportation issues for transportation authorities.
Constantly locating moving objects, i.e., geospatial tracking, is essential for autonomous building infrastructure. Accurate and robust geospatial tracking often leverages multimodal sensor fusion algorithms, which require large datasets with time-aligned, synchronized data from various sensor types. However, such datasets are not readily available. Hence, we propose GDTM, a nine-hour dataset for multimodal object tracking with distributed multimodal sensors and reconfigurable sensor node placements. Our dataset enables the exploration of several research problems, such as optimizing architectures for processing multimodal data, and investigating models' robustness to adverse sensing conditions and sensor placement variances. A GitHub repository containing the code, sample data, and checkpoints of this work is available at https://github.com/nesl/GDTM.
Reference features from a template or historical frames are crucial for visual object tracking. Prior works utilize all features from a fixed template or memory for visual object tracking. However, due to the dynamic nature of videos, the required reference historical information for different search regions at different time steps is also inconsistent. Therefore, using all features in the template and memory can lead to redundancy and impair tracking performance. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel tracking paradigm, consisting of a relevance attention mechanism and a global representation memory, which can adaptively assist the search region in selecting the most relevant historical information from reference features. Specifically, the proposed relevance attention mechanism in this work differs from previous approaches in that it can dynamically choose and build the optimal global representation memory for the current frame by accessing cross-frame information globally. Moreover, it can flexibly read the relevant historical information from the constructed memory to reduce redundancy and counteract the negative effects of harmful information. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive performance on five challenging datasets with 71 FPS.
Localizing the bronchoscope in real time is essential for ensuring intervention quality. However, most existing methods struggle to balance between speed and generalization. To address these challenges, we present BronchoTrack, an innovative real-time framework for accurate branch-level localization, encompassing lumen detection, tracking, and airway association.To achieve real-time performance, we employ a benchmark lightweight detector for efficient lumen detection. We are the first to introduce multi-object tracking to bronchoscopic localization, mitigating temporal confusion in lumen identification caused by rapid bronchoscope movement and complex airway structures. To ensure generalization across patient cases, we propose a training-free detection-airway association method based on a semantic airway graph that encodes the hierarchy of bronchial tree structures.Experiments on nine patient datasets demonstrate BronchoTrack's localization accuracy of 85.64 \%, while accessing up to the 4th generation of airways.Furthermore, we tested BronchoTrack in an in-vivo animal study using a porcine model, where it successfully localized the bronchoscope into the 8th generation airway.Experimental evaluation underscores BronchoTrack's real-time performance in both satisfying accuracy and generalization, demonstrating its potential for clinical applications.
Bimodal objects, such as the checkerboard pattern used in camera calibration, markers for object tracking, and text on road signs, to name a few, are prevalent in our daily lives and serve as a visual form to embed information that can be easily recognized by vision systems. While binarization from intensity images is crucial for extracting the embedded information in the bimodal objects, few previous works consider the task of binarization of blurry images due to the relative motion between the vision sensor and the environment. The blurry images can result in a loss in the binarization quality and thus degrade the downstream applications where the vision system is in motion. Recently, neuromorphic cameras offer new capabilities for alleviating motion blur, but it is non-trivial to first deblur and then binarize the images in a real-time manner. In this work, we propose an event-based binary reconstruction method that leverages the prior knowledge of the bimodal target's properties to perform inference independently in both event space and image space and merge the results from both domains to generate a sharp binary image. We also develop an efficient integration method to propagate this binary image to high frame rate binary video. Finally, we develop a novel method to naturally fuse events and images for unsupervised threshold identification. The proposed method is evaluated in publicly available and our collected data sequence, and shows the proposed method can outperform the SOTA methods to generate high frame rate binary video in real-time on CPU-only devices.