We propose a novel online multi-target visual tracker based on the recently developed Hypothesized and Independent Stochastic Population (HISP) filter. The HISP filter combines advantages of traditional tracking approaches like MHT and point-process-based approaches like PHD filter, and it has linear complexity while maintaining track identities. We apply this filter for tracking multiple targets in video sequences acquired under varying environmental conditions and targets density using a tracking-by-detection approach. We also adopt deep CNN appearance representation by training a verification-identification network (VerIdNet) on large-scale person re-identification data sets. We construct an augmented likelihood in a principled manner using this deep CNN appearance features and spatio-temporal information. Furthermore, we solve the problem of two or more targets having identical label considering the weight propagated with each confirmed hypothesis. Extensive experiments on MOT16 and MOT17 benchmark data sets show that our tracker significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art trackers in terms of tracking accuracy.
Visual face tracking is one of the most important tasks in video surveillance systems. However, due to the variations in pose, scale, expression, and illumination it is considered to be a difficult task. Recent studies show that deep learning methods have a significant potential in object tracking tasks and adaptive feature selection methods can boost their performance. Motivated by these, we propose an end-to-end attentive deep learning based tracker, that is build on top of the state-of-the-art GOTURN tracker, for the task of real-time visual face tracking in video surveillance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art GOTURN and IVT trackers by very large margins and it achieves speeds that are very far beyond the requirements of real-time tracking. Additionally, to overcome the scarce data problem in visual face tracking, we also provide bounding box annotations for the G1 and G2 sets of ChokePoint dataset and make it suitable for further studies in face tracking under surveillance conditions.
Traditional framework of discriminative correlation filters (DCF) is often subject to undesired boundary effects. Several approaches to enlarge search regions have been already proposed in the past years to make up for this shortcoming. However, with excessive background information, more background noises are also introduced and the discriminative filter is prone to learn from the ambiance rather than the object. This situation, along with appearance changes of objects caused by full/partial occlusion, illumination variation, and other reasons has made it more likely to have aberrances in the detection process, which could substantially degrade the credibility of its result. Therefore, in this work, a novel approach to repress the aberrances happening during the detection process is proposed, i.e., aberrance repressed correlation filter (ARCF). By enforcing restriction to the rate of alteration in response maps generated in the detection phase, the ARCF tracker can evidently suppress aberrances and is thus more robust and accurate to track objects. Considerable experiments are conducted on different UAV datasets to perform object tracking from an aerial view, i.e., UAV123, UAVDT, and DTB70, with 243 challenging image sequences containing over 90K frames to verify the performance of the ARCF tracker and it has proven itself to have outperformed other 20 state-of-the-art trackers based on DCF and deep-based frameworks with sufficient speed for real-time applications.
Psychological studies have found that human visual tracking system involves learning, memory, and planning. Despite recent successes, not many works have focused on memory and planning in deep learning based tracking. We are thus interested in memory augmented network, where an external memory remembers the evolving appearance of the target (foreground) object without backpropagation for updating weights. Our Dual Augmented Memory Network (DAWN) is unique in remembering both target and background, and using an improved attention LSTM memory to guide the focus on memorized features. DAWN is effective in unsupervised tracking in handling total occlusion, severe motion blur, abrupt changes in target appearance, multiple object instances, and similar foreground and background features. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental comparison with state-of-the-art methods including top contenders in recent VOT challenges. Notably, despite the straightforward implementation, DAWN is ranked third in both VOT2016 and VOT2017 challenges with excellent success rate among all VOT fast trackers running at fps > 10 in unsupervised tracking in both challenges. We propose DAWN-RPN, where we simply augment our memory and attention LSTM modules to the state-of-the-art SiamRPN, and report immediate performance gain, thus demonstrating DAWN can work well with and directly benefit other models to handle difficult cases as well.
In this paper, we propose an efficient online multi-object tracking framework based on the GMPHD filter and occlusion group management scheme where the GMPHD filter utilizes hierarchical data association to reduce the false negatives caused by miss detection. The hierarchical data association consists of two steps: detection-to-track and track-to-track associations, which can recover the lost tracks and their switched IDs. In addition, the proposed framework is equipped with an object grouping management scheme which handles occlusion problems with two main parts. The first part is "track merging" which can merge the false positive tracks caused by false positive detections from occlusions, where the false positive tracks are usually occluded with a measure. The measure is the occlusion ratio between visual objects, sum-of-intersection-over-area (SIOA) we defined instead of the IOU metric. The second part is "occlusion group energy minimization (OGEM)" which prevents the occluded true positive tracks from false "track merging". We define each group of the occluded objects as an energy function and find an optimal hypothesis which makes the energy minimal. We evaluate the proposed tracker in benchmark datasets such as MOT15 and MOT17 which are built for multi-person tracking. An ablation study in training dataset shows that not only "track merging" and "OGEM" complement each other but also the proposed tracking method has more robust performance and less sensitive to parameters than baseline methods. Also, SIOA works better than IOU for various sizes of false positives. Experimental results show that the proposed tracker efficiently handles occlusion situations and achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Especially, our method shows the best multi-object tracking accuracy among the online and real-time executable methods.
We propose a new Group Feature Selection method for Discriminative Correlation Filters (GFS-DCF) based visual object tracking. The key innovation of the proposed method is to perform group feature selection across both channel and spatial dimensions, thus to pinpoint the structural relevance of multi-channel features to the filtering system. In contrast to the widely used spatial regularisation or feature selection methods, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that channel selection has been advocated for DCF-based tracking. We demonstrate that our GFS-DCF method is able to significantly improve the performance of a DCF tracker equipped with deep neural network features. In addition, our GFS-DCF enables joint feature selection and filter learning, achieving enhanced discrimination and interpretability of the learned filters. To further improve the performance, we adaptively integrate historical information by constraining filters to be smooth across temporal frames, using an efficient low-rank approximation. By design, specific temporal-spatial-channel configurations are dynamically learned in the tracking process, highlighting the relevant features, and alleviating the performance degrading impact of less discriminative representations and reducing information redundancy. The experimental results obtained on OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2017, VOT2018 and TrackingNet demonstrate the merits of our GFS-DCF and its superiority over the state-of-the-art trackers. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/XU-TIANYANG/GFS-DCF.
Computer vision based object tracking has been used to annotate and augment sports video. For sports learning and training, video replay is often used in post-match review and training review for tactical analysis and movement analysis. For automatically and systematically competition data collection and tactical analysis, a project called CoachAI has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan. The proposed project also includes research of data visualization, connected training auxiliary devices, and data warehouse. Deep learning techniques will be used to develop video-based real-time microscopic competition data collection based on broadcast competition video. Machine learning techniques will be used to develop a tactical analysis. To reveal data in more understandable forms and to help in pre-match training, AR/VR techniques will be used to visualize data, tactics, and so on. In addition, training auxiliary devices including smart badminton rackets and connected serving machines will be developed based on the IoT technology to further utilize competition data and tactical data and boost training efficiency. Especially, the connected serving machines will be developed to perform specified tactics and to interact with players in their training.
The majority of contemporary object-tracking approaches do not model interactions between objects. This contrasts with the fact that objects' paths are not independent: a cyclist might abruptly deviate from a previously planned trajectory in order to avoid colliding with a car. Building upon HART, a neural class-agnostic single-object tracker, we introduce a multi-object tracking method MOHART capable of relational reasoning. Importantly, the entire system, including the understanding of interactions and relations between objects, is class-agnostic and learned simultaneously in an end-to-end fashion. We explore a number of relational reasoning architectures and show that permutation-invariant models outperform non-permutation-invariant alternatives. We also find that architectures using a single permutation invariant operation like DeepSets, despite, in theory, being universal function approximators, are nonetheless outperformed by a more complex architecture based on multi-headed attention. The latter better accounts for complex physical interactions in a challenging toy experiment. Further, we find that modelling interactions leads to consistent performance gains in tracking as well as future trajectory prediction on three real-world datasets (MOTChallenge, UA-DETRAC, and Stanford Drone dataset), particularly in the presence of ego-motion, occlusions, crowded scenes, and faulty sensor inputs.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
In recent years, deep-learning-based visual object trackers have been studied thoroughly, but handling occlusions and/or rapid motion of the target remains challenging. In this work, we argue that conditioning on the natural language (NL) description of a target provides information for longer-term invariance, and thus helps cope with typical tracking challenges. However, deriving a formulation to combine the strengths of appearance-based tracking with the language modality is not straightforward. We propose a novel deep tracking-by-detection formulation that can take advantage of NL descriptions. Regions that are related to the given NL description are generated by a proposal network during the detection phase of the tracker. Our LSTM based tracker then predicts the update of the target from regions proposed by the NL based detection phase. In benchmarks, our method is competitive with state of the art trackers, while it outperforms all other trackers on targets with unambiguous and precise language annotations. It also beats the state-of-the-art NL tracker when initializing without a bounding box. Our method runs at over 30 fps on a single GPU.
Existing deep multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches first learn a deep representation to describe target objects and then associate detection results by optimizing a linear assignment problem. Despite demonstrated successes, it is challenging to discriminate target objects under mutual occlusion or to reduce identity switches in crowded scenes. In this paper, we propose learning deep conditional random field (CRF) networks, aiming to model the assignment costs as unary potentials and the long-term dependencies among detection results as pairwise potentials. Specifically, we use a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) network to encode the long-term dependencies. We pose the CRF inference as a recurrent neural network learning process using the standard gradient descent algorithm, where unary and pairwise potentials are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results on the challenging MOT datasets including MOT-2015 and MOT-2016, demonstrate that our approach achieves the state of the art performances in comparison with published works on both benchmarks.
Background subtraction is a basic task in computer vision and video processing often applied as a pre-processing step for object tracking, people recognition, etc. Recently, a number of successful background-subtraction algorithms have been proposed, however nearly all of the top-performing ones are supervised. Crucially, their success relies upon the availability of some annotated frames of the test video during training. Consequently, their performance on completely "unseen" videos is undocumented in the literature. In this work, we propose a new, supervised, background-subtraction algorithm for unseen videos (BSUV-Net) based on a fully-convolutional neural network. The input to our network consists of the current frame and two background frames captured at different time scales along with their semantic segmentation maps. In order to reduce the chance of overfitting, we also introduce a new data-augmentation technique which mitigates the impact of illumination difference between the background frames and the current frame. On the CDNet-2014 dataset, BSUV-Net outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms evaluated on unseen videos in terms of several metrics including F-measure, recall and precision.
In recent years, Siamese network based trackers have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in real-time tracking. Despite their success, Siamese trackers tend to suffer from high memory costs, which restrict their applicability to mobile devices with tight memory budgets. To address this issue, we propose a distilled Siamese tracking framework to learn small, fast and accurate trackers (students), which capture critical knowledge from large Siamese trackers (teachers) by a teacher-students knowledge distillation model. This model is intuitively inspired by the one teacher vs. multiple students learning method typically employed in schools. In particular, our model contains a single teacher-student distillation module and a student-student knowledge sharing mechanism. The former is designed using a tracking-specific distillation strategy to transfer knowledge from a teacher to students. The latter is utilized for mutual learning between students to enable in-depth knowledge understanding. Extensive empirical evaluations on several popular Siamese trackers demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our framework. Moreover, the results on five tracking benchmarks show that the proposed distilled trackers achieve compression rates of up to 18$\times$ and frame-rates of $265$ FPS, while obtaining comparable tracking accuracy compared to base models.
Many problems in signal processing and machine learning can be formalized as weak submodular optimization tasks. For such problems, a simple greedy algorithm (\textsc{Greedy}) is guaranteed to find a solution achieving the objective with a value no worse than $1-e^{-1/c}$ of the optimal, where $c$ is the multiplicative weak-submodularity constant. Due to the high cost of querying large-scale systems, the complexity of \textsc{Greedy} becomes prohibitive in contemporary applications. In this work, we study the tradeoff between performance and complexity when one resorts to random sampling strategies to reduce the query complexity of \textsc{Greedy}. Specifically, we quantify the effect of uniform sampling strategies on \textsc{Greedy}'s performance through two metrics: (i) probability of identifying an optimal subset, and (ii) suboptimality with respect to the optimal solution. The latter implies that uniform sampling strategies with a fixed sampling size achieve a non-trivial approximation factor; however, we show that with overwhelming probability, these methods fail to find the optimal subset. Our analysis shows that the failure of uniform sampling strategies with fixed sample size can be circumvented by successively increasing the size of the search space. Building upon this insight, we propose a simple progressive stochastic greedy algorithm and study its approximation guarantees. Moreover, we demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method in dimensionality reduction applications and feature selection tasks for clustering and object tracking.
Object tracking has important application in assistive technologies for personalized monitoring. Recent trackers choosing AlexNet as their backbone to extract features have gained great success. However, AlexNet is too shallow to form a strong feature representation, the tracker based on the Siamese network have an accuracy gap compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a tracker called SiamPF. Firstly, the modified pre-trained VGG16 network is fine-tuned as the backbone. Secondly, an AlexNet-like branch is added after the third convolutional layer and merged with the response map of the backbone network to form a preliminary strong feature representation. And then, a channel attention block is designed to adaptively select the contribution features. Finally, the APCE is modified to process the response map to reduce interference and focus the tracker on the target. Our SiamPF only used ILSVRC2015-VID for training, but it achieved excellent performance on OTB-2013 / OTB-2015 / VOT2015 / VOT2017, while maintaining the real-time performance of 41FPS on the GTX 1080Ti.
In the field of bioimaging, an important part of analyzing the motion of objects is tracking. We propose a method that applies the Sinkhorn distance for solving the optimal transport problem to track objects. The advantage of this method is that it can flexibly incorporate various assumptions in tracking as a cost matrix. First, we extend the Sinkhorn distance from two dimensions to three dimensions. Using this three-dimensional distance, we compare the performance of two types of tracking technique, namely tracking that associates objects that are close to each other, which conventionally uses the nearest-neighbor method, and tracking that assumes that the object is moving at constant velocity, using three types of simulation data. The results suggest that when tracking objects moving at constant velocity, our method is superior to conventional nearest-neighbor tracking as long as the added noise is not excessively large. We show that the Sinkhorn method can be applied effectively to object tracking. Our simulation data analysis suggests that when objects are moving at constant velocity, our method, which sets acceleration as a cost, outperforms the traditional nearest-neighbor method in terms of tracking objects. To apply the proposed method to real bioimaging data, it is necessary to set an appropriate cost indicator based on the movement features.
In this work, we present an end-to-end framework to settle data association in online Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT). Given detection responses, we formulate the frame-by-frame data association as Maximum Weighted Bipartite Matching problem, whose solution is learned using a neural network. The network incorporates an affinity learning module, wherein both appearance and motion cues are investigated to encode object feature representation and compute pairwise affinities. Employing the computed affinities as edge weights, the following matching problem on a bipartite graph is resolved by the optimization module, which leverages a graph neural network to adapt with the varying cardinalities of the association problem and solve the combinatorial hardness with favorable scalability and compatibility. To facilitate effective training of the proposed tracking network, we design a multi-level matrix loss in conjunction with the assembled supervision methodology. Being trained end-to-end, all modules in the tracker can co-adapt and co-operate collaboratively, resulting in improved model adaptiveness and less parameter-tuning efforts. Experiment results on the MOT benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
We present a fully event-driven vision and processing system for selective attention and tracking, realized on a neuromorphic processor Loihi interfaced to an event-based Dynamic Vision Sensor DAVIS. The attention mechanism is realized as a recurrent spiking neural network that implements attractor-dynamics of dynamic neural fields. We demonstrate capability of the system to create sustained activation that supports object tracking when distractors are present or when the object slows down or stops, reducing the number of generated events.
3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is an essential component for many applications such as autonomous driving and assistive robotics. Recent work on 3D MOT focuses on developing accurate systems giving less attention to practical considerations such as computational cost and system complexity. In contrast, this work proposes a simple real-time 3D MOT system. Our system first obtains 3D detections from a LiDAR point cloud. Then, a straightforward combination of a 3D Kalman filter and the Hungarian algorithm is used for state estimation and data association. Additionally, 3D MOT datasets such as KITTI evaluate MOT methods in the 2D space and standardized 3D MOT evaluation tools are missing for a fair comparison of 3D MOT methods. Therefore, we propose a new 3D MOT evaluation tool along with three new metrics to comprehensively evaluate 3D MOT methods. We show that, although our system employs a combination of classical MOT modules, we achieve state-of-the-art 3D MOT performance on two 3D MOT benchmarks (KITTI and nuScenes). Surprisingly, although our system does not use any 2D data as inputs, we achieve competitive performance on the KITTI 2D MOT leaderboard. Our proposed system runs at a rate of $207.4$ FPS on the KITTI dataset, achieving the fastest speed among all modern MOT systems. To encourage standardized 3D MOT evaluation, our system and evaluation code are made publicly available at https://github.com/xinshuoweng/AB3DMOT.
In this paper, we demonstrate a novel algorithm that uses ellipse fitting to estimate the bounding box rotation angle and size with the segmentation(mask) on the target for online and real-time visual object tracking. Our method, SiamMask_E, improves the bounding box fitting procedure of the state-of-the-art object tracking algorithm SiamMask and still retains a fast-tracking frame rate (80 fps) on a system equipped with GPU (GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or higher). We tested our approach on the visual object tracking datasets (VOT2016, VOT2018, and VOT2019) that were labeled with rotated bounding boxes. By comparing with the original SiamMask, we achieved an improved Accuracy of 0.652 and 0.309 EAO on VOT2019, which is 0.056 and 0.026 higher than the original SiamMask. The implementation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/baoxinchen/siammask_e.