In this project, we implement a multiple object tracker, following the tracking-by-detection paradigm, as an extension of an existing method. It works by modelling the movement of objects by solving the filtering problem, and associating detections with predicted new locations in new frames using the Hungarian algorithm. Three different similarity measures are used, which use the location and shape of the bounding boxes. Compared to other trackers on the MOTChallenge leaderboard, our method, referred to as C++SORT, is the fastest non-anonymous submission, while also achieving decent score on other metrics. By running our model on the Okutama-Action dataset, sampled at different frame-rates, we show that the performance is greatly reduced when running the model - including detecting objects - in real-time. In most metrics, the score is reduced by 50%, but in certain cases as much as 90%. We argue that this indicates that other, slower methods could not be used for tracking in real-time, but that more research is required specifically on this.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a challenging practical problem for vision based applications. Most recent approaches for MOT use precomputed detections from models such as Faster RCNN, performing fine-tuning of bounding boxes and association in subsequent phases. However, this is not suitable for actual industrial applications due to unavailability of detections upfront. In their recent work, Wang et al. proposed a tracking pipeline that uses a Joint detection and embedding model and performs target localization and association in realtime. Upon investigating the tracking by detection paradigm…
Seoul National University(首尔国立大学);Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);University of Birmingham(伯明翰大学);NAVER Corp.(NAVER公司)
We propose a new context-aware correlation filter based tracking framework to achieve both high computational speed and state-of-the-art performance among real-time trackers. The major contribution to the high computational speed lies in the proposed deep feature compression that is achieved by a context-aware scheme utilizing multiple expert auto-encoders; a context in our framework refers to the coarse category of the tracking target according to appearance patterns. In the pre-training phase, one expert auto-encoder is trained per category. In the tracking phase, the best expert auto-encode…
In the domain of visual tracking, most deep learning-based trackers highlight the accuracy but casting aside efficiency. Therefore, their real-world deployment on mobile platforms like the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is impeded. In this work, a novel two-stage Siamese network-based method is proposed for aerial tracking, \textit{i.e.}, stage-1 for high-quality anchor proposal generation, stage-2 for refining the anchor proposal. Different from anchor-based methods with numerous pre-defined fixed-sized anchors, our no-prior method can 1) increase the robustness and generalization to different…
Dalian University of Technology(大连理工大学);National University of Defense Technology(国防科技大学);Peng Cheng Laboratory(鹏城实验室)
In recent years, target tracking has made great progress in accuracy. This development is mainly attributed to powerful networks (such as transformers) and additional modules (such as online update and refinement modules). However, less attention has been paid to tracking speed. Most state-of-the-art trackers are satisfied with the real-time speed on powerful GPUs. However, practical applications necessitate higher requirements for tracking speed, especially when edge platforms with limited resources are used. In this work, we present an efficient tracking method via a hierarchical cross-atten…
In the recent literature, on the one hand, many 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) works have focused on tracking accuracy and neglected computation speed, commonly by designing rather complex cost functions and feature extractors. On the other hand, some methods have focused too much on computation speed at the expense of tracking accuracy. In view of these issues, this paper proposes a robust and fast camera-LiDAR fusion-based MOT method that achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. Relying on the characteristics of camera and LiDAR sensors, an effective deep association mechanism i…
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);Queensland University of Technology(昆士兰科技大学)
In this paper, we propose the first higher frame rate video dataset (called Need for Speed - NfS) and benchmark for visual object tracking. The dataset consists of 100 videos (380K frames) captured with now commonly available higher frame rate (240 FPS) cameras from real world scenarios. All frames are annotated with axis aligned bounding boxes and all sequences are manually labelled with nine visual attributes - such as occlusion, fast motion, background clutter, etc. Our benchmark provides an extensive evaluation of many recent and state-of-the-art trackers on higher frame rate sequences. We…
Computer vision technologies are very attractive for practical applications running on embedded systems. For such an application, it is desirable for the deployed algorithms to run in high-speed and require no offline training. To develop a single-target tracking algorithm with these properties, we propose an ensemble of the kernelized correlation filters (KCF), we call it EnKCF. A committee of KCFs is specifically designed to address the variations in scale and translation of moving objects. To guarantee a high-speed run-time performance, we deploy each of KCFs in turn, instead of applying mu…
Multiple human tracking is a fundamental problem for scene understanding. Although both accuracy and speed are required in real-world applications, recent tracking methods based on deep learning have focused on accuracy and require substantial running time. This study aims to improve running speed by performing human detection at a certain frame interval because it accounts for most of the running time. The question is how to maintain accuracy while skipping human detection. In this paper, we propose a method that complements the detection results with optical flow, based on the fact that some…
FARTrack: Fast Autoregressive Visual Tracking with High Performance
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学软件工程学院);State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学人机混合增强智能国家重点实验室);DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group(阿里云达摩院);National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学)
Xiamen University(厦门大学);Tsinghua University(清华大学);Xiamen University of Technology(厦门理工学院);Queen’s University Belfast(贝尔法斯特女王大学)
In recent years, deep learning based visual tracking methods have obtained great success owing to the powerful feature representation ability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Among these methods, classification-based tracking methods exhibit excellent performance while their speeds are heavily limited by the expensive computation for massive proposal feature extraction. In contrast, matching-based tracking methods (such as Siamese networks) possess remarkable speed superiority. However, the absence of online updating renders these methods unadaptable to significant object appearance va…
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所)
Visual object tracking is a fundamental and time-critical vision task. Recent years have seen many shallow tracking methods based on real-time pixel-based correlation filters, as well as deep methods that have top performance but need a high-end GPU. In this paper, we learn to improve the speed of deep trackers without losing accuracy. Our fundamental insight is to take an adaptive approach, where easy frames are processed with cheap features (such as pixel values), while challenging frames are processed with invariant but expensive deep features. We formulate the adaptive tracking problem as …
MeanShift algorithm has been widely used in tracking tasks because of its simplicity and efficiency. However, the traditional MeanShift algorithm needs to label the initial region of the target, which reduces the applicability of the algorithm. Furthermore, it is only applicable to the scene with a large overlap rate between the target area and the candidate area. Therefore, when the target speed is fast, the target scale change, shape deformation or the target occlusion occurs, the tracking performance will be deteriorated. In this paper, we address the challenges above-mentioned by developin…
Jiangxi University of Science and Technology(江西理工大学)
In recent years, anchor-free object detection models combined with matching algorithms are used to achieve real-time muti-object tracking and also ensure high tracking accuracy. However, there are still great challenges in multi-object tracking. For example, when most part of a target is occluded or the target just disappears from images temporarily, it often leads to tracking interruptions for most of the existing tracking algorithms. Therefore, this study offers a bi-directional matching algorithm for multi-object tracking that makes advantage of bi-directional motion prediction information …
Seoul National University(首尔国立大学);Chung-Ang Univeristy(中央大学)
In this paper, we propose a novel on-line visual tracking framework based on the Siamese matching network and meta-learner network, which run at real-time speeds. Conventional deep convolutional feature-based discriminative visual tracking algorithms require continuous re-training of classifiers or correlation filters, which involve solving complex optimization tasks to adapt to the new appearance of a target object. To alleviate this complex process, our proposed algorithm incorporates and utilizes a meta-learner network to provide the matching network with new appearance information of the t…
Iowa State University(爱荷华州立大学);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
We study the problem of tracking (causally estimating) a time sequence of sparse spatial signals with changing sparsity patterns, as well as other unknown states, from a sequence of nonlinear observations corrupted by (possibly) non-Gaussian noise. In many applications, particularly those in visual tracking, the unknown state can be split into a small dimensional part, e.g. global motion, and a spatial signal, e.g. illumination or shape deformation. The spatial signal is often well modeled as being sparse in some domain. For a long sequence, its sparsity pattern can change over time, although …
Northwestern Polytechnical University(西北工业大学);SenseTime Group Limited(商汤科技集团有限公司);University of Sydney(悉尼大学)
Visual Object Tracking (VOT) can be seen as an extended task of Few-Shot Learning (FSL). While the concept of FSL is not new in tracking and has been previously applied by prior works, most of them are tailored to fit specific types of FSL algorithms and may sacrifice running speed. In this work, we propose a generalized two-stage framework that is capable of employing a large variety of FSL algorithms while presenting faster adaptation speed. The first stage uses a Siamese Regional Proposal Network to efficiently propose the potential candidates and the second stage reformulates the task of c…
6-DoF Object Tracking with Event-based Optical Flow and Frames
Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia(人形感知与感知,意大利技术研究所);Event-driven Perception for Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia(机器人驱动感知,意大利技术研究所);University of Genoa(热那亚大学)
Hangzhou Dianzi University(杭州电子科技大学);The University of Sydney(悉尼大学)
Current 3D single object tracking methods are typically based on VoteNet, a 3D region proposal network. Despite the success, using a single seed point feature as the cue for offset learning in VoteNet prevents high-quality 3D proposals from being generated. Moreover, seed points with different importance are treated equally in the voting process, aggravating this defect. To address these issues, we propose a novel global-local transformer voting scheme to provide more informative cues and guide the model pay more attention on potential seed points, promoting the generation of high-quality 3D p…
Most of the existing tracking methods based on CNN(convolutional neural networks) are too slow for real-time application despite the excellent tracking precision compared with the traditional ones. Moreover, neural networks are memory intensive which will take up lots of hardware resources. In this paper, a feature selection visual tracking algorithm combining CNN based MDNet(Multi-Domain Network) and RoIAlign was developed. We find that there is a lot of redundancy in feature maps from convolutional layers. So valid feature maps are selected by mutual information and others are abandoned whic…
Tongji University(同济大学);National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);The University of Hong Kong(香港大学)
Correlation filter-based tracking has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with high efficiency. However, it has two imperfections, i.e., boundary effect and filter corruption. Several methods enlarging the search area can mitigate boundary effect, yet introducing undesired background distraction. Existing frame-by-frame context learning strategies for repressing background distraction nevertheless lower the tracking speed. Inspired by keyframe-based simultaneous localization and mapping, keyfilter is proposed in visual tracking for the first time, in order to handle the above …
Structured output support vector machine (SVM) based tracking algorithms have shown favorable performance recently. Nonetheless, the time-consuming candidate sampling and complex optimization limit their real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel large margin object tracking method which absorbs the strong discriminative ability from structured output SVM and speeds up by the correlation filter algorithm significantly. Secondly, a multimodal target detection technique is proposed to improve the target localization precision and prevent model drift introduced by similar objects o…
CASIA(中国科学院自动化研究所);University of Oxford(牛津大学);FiveAI
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…
Deakin University(迪肯大学);The University of Warwick(Warwick)
Driven by recent advances in object detection with deep neural networks, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has gained increasing prevalence in the research community of multi-object tracking (MOT). It has long been known that appearance information plays an essential role in the detection-to-track association, which lies at the core of the tracking-by-detection paradigm. While most existing works consider the appearance distances between the detections and the tracks, they ignore the statistical information implied by the historical appearance distance records in the tracks, which can be part…
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University(南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室);Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University(南京大学计算机科学与技术系);School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University(南京大学电子科学与工程学院)
Single object tracking (SOT) is currently one of the most important tasks in computer vision. With the development of the deep network and the release for a series of large scale datasets for single object tracking, siamese networks have been proposed and perform better than most of the traditional methods. However, recent siamese networks get deeper and slower to obtain better performance. Most of these methods could only meet the needs of real-time object tracking in ideal environments. In order to achieve a better balance between efficiency and accuracy, we propose a simpler siamese network…
Shenzhen Graduate School, Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究生院);Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University(清华大学深圳研究生院)
Correlation filter (CF) based tracking algorithms have demonstrated favorable performance recently. Nevertheless, the top performance trackers always employ complicated optimization methods which constraint their real-time applications. How to accelerate the tracking speed while retaining the tracking accuracy is a significant issue. In this paper, we propose a multi-level CF-based tracking approach named MLCFT which further explores the potential capacity of CF with two-stage detection: primal detection and oriented re-detection. The cascaded detection scheme is simple but competent to preven…
Tsinghua University(清华大学);University of California, Santa Barbara(加州大学圣巴巴拉分校)
Computer-science-oriented artificial neural networks (ANNs) have achieved tremendous success in a variety of scenarios via powerful feature extraction and high-precision data operations. It is well known, however, that ANNs usually suffer from expensive processing resources and costs. In contrast, neuroscience-oriented spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient information processing benefit from the event-driven spike activities, whereas, they are yet be evidenced to achieve impressive effectiveness on real complicated tasks. How to combine the advantage of these two mo…
We present DroTrack, a high-speed visual single-object tracking framework for drone-captured video sequences. Most of the existing object tracking methods are designed to tackle well-known challenges, such as occlusion and cluttered backgrounds. The complex motion of drones, i.e., multiple degrees of freedom in three-dimensional space, causes high uncertainty. The uncertainty problem leads to inaccurate location predictions and fuzziness in scale estimations. DroTrack solves such issues by discovering the dependency between object representation and motion geometry. We implement an effective o…
Template-matching methods for visual tracking have gained popularity recently due to their comparable performance and fast speed. However, they lack effective ways to adapt to changes in the target object's appearance, making their tracking accuracy still far from state-of-the-art. In this paper, we propose a dynamic memory network to adapt the template to the target's appearance variations during tracking. An LSTM is used as a memory controller, where the input is the search feature map and the outputs are the control signals for the reading and writing process of the memory block. As the loc…
Recently, correlation filter-based trackers have received extensive attention due to their simplicity and superior speed. However, such trackers perform poorly when the target undergoes occlusion, viewpoint change or other challenging attributes due to pre-defined sampling strategy. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose an adaptive region proposal scheme to facilitate visual tracking. To be more specific, a novel tracking monitoring indicator is advocated to forecast tracking failure. Afterwards, we incorporate detection and scale proposals respectively, to recover from model drift…
Shenzhen Graduate School, Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究生院);Sanechips Technology Co., Ltd(中兴微电子技术有限公司)
In current visual object tracking system, the CPU or GPU-based visual object tracking systems have high computational cost and consume a prohibitive amount of power. Therefore, in this paper, to reduce the computational burden of the Camshift algorithm, we propose a novel visual object tracking algorithm by exploiting the properties of the binary classifier and Kalman predictor. Moreover, we present a low-cost FPGA-based real-time object tracking hardware architecture. Extensive evaluations on OTB benchmark demonstrate that the proposed system has extremely compelling real-time, stability and …
University of Maryland(马里兰大学);Robotics at Google(谷歌机器人部门)
We introduce a new high resolution, high frame rate stereo video dataset, which we call SPIN, for tracking and action recognition in the game of ping pong. The corpus consists of ping pong play with three main annotation streams that can be used to learn tracking and action recognition models -- tracking of the ping pong ball and poses of humans in the videos and the spin of the ball being hit by humans. The training corpus consists of 53 hours of data with labels derived from previous models in a semi-supervised method. The testing corpus contains 1 hour of data with the same information, exc…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);CASIA(中国科学院自动化研究所);Microsoft Research(微软研究院)
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 r…
Politecnico di Milano(米兰理工大学);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学);University of Guilan(吉兰大学)
Recently, sparse representation based visual tracking methods have attracted increasing attention in the computer vision community. Although achieve superior performance to traditional tracking methods, however, a basic problem has not been answered yet --- that whether the sparsity constrain is really needed for visual tracking? To answer this question, in this paper, we first propose a robust non-sparse representation based tracker and then conduct extensive experiments to compare it against several state-of-the-art sparse representation based trackers. Our experiment results and analysis in…
In this work, a novel high-speed single object tracker that is robust against non-semantic distractor exemplars is introduced; dubbed BOBBY2. It incorporates a novel exemplar buffer module that sparsely caches the target's appearance across time, enabling it to adapt to potential target deformation. As for training, an augmented ImageNet-VID dataset was used in conjunction with the one cycle policy, enabling it to reach convergence with less than 2 epoch worth of data. For validation, the model was benchmarked on the GOT-10k dataset and on an additional small, albeit challenging custom UAV dat…
In this paper, we construct a lightweight, high-precision and high-speed object tracking using a trained CNN. Conventional methods with trained CNNs use VGG16 network which requires powerful computational resources. Therefore, there is a problem that it is difficult to apply in low computation resources environments. To solve this problem, we use MobileNetV3, which is a CNN for mobile terminals.Based on Feature Map Selection Tracking, we propose a new architecture that extracts effective features of MobileNet for object tracking. The architecture requires no online learning but only offline le…
Object trackers based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on recent tracking benchmarks, while they suffer from slow computational speed. The high computational load arises from the extraction of the feature maps of the candidate and training patches in every video frame. The candidate and training patches are typically placed randomly around the previous target location and the estimated target location respectively. In this paper, we propose novel schemes to speed-up the processing of the CNN-based trackers. We input the whole region-of-interest onc…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen(哈尔滨工业大学(深圳));Peng Cheng Laboratory(鹏城实验室)
Visual object tracking acts as a pivotal component in various emerging video applications. Despite the numerous developments in visual tracking, existing deep trackers are still likely to fail when tracking against objects with dramatic variation. These deep trackers usually do not perform online update or update single sub-branch of the tracking model, for which they cannot adapt to the appearance variation of objects. Efficient updating methods are therefore crucial for tracking while previous meta-updater optimizes trackers directly over parameter space, which is prone to over-fit even coll…
Ball trajectory data are one of the most fundamental and useful information in the evaluation of players' performance and analysis of game strategies. Although vision-based object tracking techniques have been developed to analyze sport competition videos, it is still challenging to recognize and position a high-speed and tiny ball accurately. In this paper, we develop a deep learning network, called TrackNet, to track the tennis ball from broadcast videos in which the ball images are small, blurry, and sometimes with afterimage tracks or even invisible. The proposed heatmap-based deep learnin…
Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学);Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Intelligent Robots and Systems(北京智能机器人与系统高精尖创新中心)
Most of the existing tracking methods based on CNN(convolutional neural networks) are too slow for real-time application despite the excellent tracking precision compared with the traditional ones. In this paper, a fast dynamic visual tracking algorithm combining CNN based MDNet(Multi-Domain Network) and RoIAlign was developed. The major problem of MDNet also lies in the time efficiency. Considering the computational complexity of MDNet is mainly caused by the large amount of convolution operations and fine-tuning of the network during tracking, a RoIPool layer which could conduct the convolut…
Industrial Artificial Intelligence (INARI) Research Lab(工业人工智能(INARI)研究实验室);Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral(滨海高等理工学院)
Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT) is of crucial importance for applications such as retail video analytics and video surveillance. Object detectors are often the computational bottleneck of modern MOT systems, limiting their use for real-time applications. In this paper, we address this issue by leveraging on an ensemble of detectors, each running every f frames. We measured the performance of our system in the MOT16 benchmark. The proposed model surpassed other online entries of the MOT16 challenge in speed, while maintaining an acceptable accuracy.
3D hand tracking methods based on monocular RGB videos are easily affected by motion blur, while event camera, a sensor with high temporal resolution and dynamic range, is naturally suitable for this task with sparse output and low power consumption. However, obtaining 3D annotations of fast-moving hands is difficult for constructing event-based hand-tracking datasets. In this paper, we provided an event-based speed adaptive hand tracker (ESAHT) to solve the hand tracking problem based on event camera. We enabled a CNN model trained on a hand tracking dataset with slow motion, which enabled th…
Nanyang Technological University(南洋理工大学);Institute for Infocomm Research(资讯通信研究院)
It is challenging to design a high speed tracking approach using l1-norm due to its non-differentiability. In this paper, a new kernelized correlation filter is introduced by leveraging the sparsity attribute of l1-norm based regularization to design a high speed tracker. We combine the l1-norm and l2-norm based regularizations in one Huber-type loss function, and then formulate an optimization problem in the Fourier Domain for fast computation, which enables the tracker to adaptively ignore the noisy features produced from occlusion and illumination variation, while keep the advantages of l2-…
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University(弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学)
In a previous study, we presented VT-Lane, a three-step framework for real-time vehicle detection, tracking, and turn movement classification at urban intersections. In this study, we present a case study incorporating the highly accurate trajectories and movement classification obtained via VT-Lane for the purpose of speed estimation and driver behavior calibration for traffic at urban intersections. First, we use a highly instrumented vehicle to verify the estimated speeds obtained from video inference. The results of the speed validation show that our method can estimate the average travel …
Sorbonne Universités(索邦大学);University of Pittsburgh(匹兹堡大学);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
This paper presents a new event-based method for detecting and tracking features from the output of an event-based camera. Unlike many tracking algorithms from the computer vision community, this process does not aim for particular predefined shapes such as corners. It relies on a dual intertwined iterative continuous -- pure event-based -- estimation of the velocity vector and a bayesian description of the generative feature contours. By projecting along estimated speeds updated for each incoming event it is possible to identify and determine the spatial location and generative contour of the…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications(北京邮电大学)
Correlation filter (CF) based trackers are currently ranked top in terms of their performances. Nevertheless, only some of them, such as KCF~\cite{henriques15} and MKCF~\cite{tangm15}, are able to exploit the powerful discriminability of non-linear kernels. Although MKCF achieves more powerful discriminability than KCF through introducing multi-kernel learning (MKL) into KCF, its improvement over KCF is quite limited and its computational burden increases significantly in comparison with KCF. In this paper, we will introduce the MKL into KCF in a different way than MKCF. We reformulate the MKL…
Dynamic Semantic-Aware Correlation Modeling for UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University(计算机科学与人工智能学院,复旦大学);College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University(智能机器人与先进制造学院,复旦大学)
Technical University of Vienna(维也纳技术大学);AIT Austrian Institute of Technology(奥地利技术研究院)
Motion and dynamic environments, especially under challenging lighting conditions, are still an open issue for robust robotic applications. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end pipeline for real-time, low latency, 6 degrees-of-freedom pose estimation of fiducial markers. Instead of achieving a pose estimation through a conventional frame-based approach, we employ the high-speed abilities of event-based sensors to directly refine the spatial transformation, using consecutive events. Furthermore, we introduce a novel two-way verification process for detecting tracking errors by backtracking t…