An End-to-end Video Text Detector with Online Tracking
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR)（模式识别国家重点实验室）；Chinese Academy of Sciences Artificial Intelligence Research (CAS-AIR)（中国科学院人工智能研究院）
Hongyuan Yu, Chengquan Zhang, Xuan Li, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Liang Wang
Video text detection is considered as one of the most difficult tasks in document analysis due to the following two challenges: 1) the difficulties caused by video scenes, i.e., motion blur, illumination changes, and occlusion; 2) the properties of text including variants of fonts, languages, orientations, and shapes. Most existing methods attempt to enhance the performance of video text detection by cooperating with video text tracking, but treat these two tasks separately. In this work, we propose an end-to-end video text detection model with online tracking to address these two challenges. Specifically, in the detection branch, we adopt ConvLSTM to capture spatial structure information and motion memory. In the tracking branch, we convert the tracking problem to text instance association, and an appearance-geometry descriptor with memory mechanism is proposed to generate robust representation of text instances. By integrating these two branches into one trainable framework, they can promote each other and the computational cost is significantly reduced. Experiments on existing video text benchmarks including ICDAR2013 Video, Minetto and YVT demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our method improves F-score by about 2 on all datasets and it can run realtime with 24.36 fps on TITAN Xp.
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Satellite video cameras can provide continuous observation for a large-scale area, which is important for many remote sensing applications. However, achieving moving object detection and tracking in satellite videos remains challenging due to the insufficient appearance information of objects and lack of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we first build a large-scale satellite video dataset with rich annotations for the task of moving object detection and tracking. This dataset is collected by the Jilin-1 satellite constellation and composed of 47 high-quality videos with 1,646,038 instance…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）
Recently, video scene text detection has received increasing attention due to its comprehensive applications. However, the lack of annotated scene text video datasets has become one of the most important problems, which hinders the development of video scene text detection. The existing scene text video datasets are not large-scale due to the expensive cost caused by manual labeling. In addition, the text instances in these datasets are too clear to be a challenge. To address the above issues, we propose a tracking based semi-automatic labeling strategy for scene text videos in this paper. We …
Multiple existing benchmarks involve tracking and segmenting objects in video e.g., Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation (MOTS), but there is little interaction between them due to the use of disparate benchmark datasets and metrics (e.g. J&F, mAP, sMOTSA). As a result, published works usually target a particular benchmark, and are not easily comparable to each another. We believe that the development of generalized methods that can tackle multiple tasks requires greater cohesion among these research sub-communities. In this paper, we aim to facilitate thi…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Tracking multiple athletes in sports videos is a very challenging Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) task, since athletes often have the same appearance and are intimately covered with each other, making a common occlusion problem becomes an abhorrent duplicate detection. In this paper, the duplicate detection is newly and precisely defined as occlusion misreporting on the same athlete by multiple detection boxes in one frame. To address this problem, we meticulously design a novel transformer-based Duplicate Detection Decontaminator (D$^3$) for training, and a specific algorithm Rally-Hungarian (RH)…
In this paper we propose a system capable of tracking multiple soccer players in different types of video quality. The main goal, in contrast to most state-of-art soccer player tracking systems, is the ability of execute effectively tracking in videos of low-quality. We adapted a state-of-art Multiple Object Tracking to the task. In order to do that adaptation, we created a Detection and a Tracking Dataset for 3 different qualities of video. The results of our system are conclusive of its high performance.
Parameter tuning is a common issue for many tracking algorithms. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an online parameter tuning to adapt a tracking algorithm to various scene contexts. In an offline training phase, this approach learns how to tune the tracker parameters to cope with different contexts. In the online control phase, once the tracking quality is evaluated as not good enough, the proposed approach computes the current context and tunes the tracking parameters using the learned values. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance…
Portland State University（波特兰州立大学）；Intel Corporation（英特尔公司）
We present a novel algorithm utilizing a deep Siamese neural network as a general object similarity function in combination with a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework to encode spatio-temporal information for efficient object tracking in video. In particular, we treat the video tracking problem as a dynamic (i.e. temporally-evolving) optimization problem. Using Gaussian Process priors, we model a dynamic objective function representing the location of a tracked object in each frame. By exploiting temporal correlations, the proposed method queries the search space in a statistically principled…
This paper presents a new way of getting high-quality saliency maps for video, using a cheaper alternative to eye-tracking data. We designed a mouse-contingent video viewing system which simulates the viewers' peripheral vision based on the position of the mouse cursor. The system enables the use of mouse-tracking data recorded from an ordinary computer mouse as an alternative to real gaze fixations recorded by a more expensive eye-tracker. We developed a crowdsourcing system that enables the collection of such mouse-tracking data at large scale. Using the collected mouse-tracking data we show…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云服务）
In this paper, we explore learning end-to-end deep neural trackers without tracking annotations. This is important as large-scale training data is essential for training deep neural trackers while tracking annotations are expensive to acquire. In place of tracking annotations, we first hallucinate videos from images with bounding box annotations using zoom-in/out motion transformations to obtain free tracking labels. We add video simulation augmentations to create a diverse tracking dataset, albeit with simple motion. Next, to tackle harder tracking cases, we mine hard examples across an unlab…
INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Phu Xuan Private University（富春私立大学）
Mobile object tracking has an important role in the computer vision applications. In this paper, we use a tracked target-based taxonomy to present the object tracking algorithms. The tracked targets are divided into three categories: points of interest, appearance and silhouette of mobile objects. Advantages and limitations of the tracking approaches are also analyzed to find the future directions in the object tracking domain.
We present an approach for object segmentation in videos that combines frame-level object detection with concepts from object tracking and motion segmentation. The approach extracts temporally consistent object tubes based on an off-the-shelf detector. Besides the class label for each tube, this provides a location prior that is independent of motion. For the final video segmentation, we combine this information with motion cues. The method overcomes the typical problems of weakly supervised/unsupervised video segmentation, such as scenes with no motion, dominant camera motion, and objects tha…
A robust algorithm solution is proposed for tracking an object in complex video scenes. In this solution, the bootstrap particle filter (PF) is initialized by an object detector, which models the time-evolving background of the video signal by an adaptive Gaussian mixture. The motion of the object is expressed by a Markov model, which defines the state transition prior. The color and texture features are used to represent the object, and a marginal likelihood based feature fusion approach is proposed. A corresponding object template model updating procedure is developed to account for possible…
New York University（纽约大学）；Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学）
Object detection and object tracking are usually treated as two separate processes. Significant progress has been made for object detection in 2D images using deep learning networks. The usual tracking-by-detection pipeline for object tracking requires that the object is successfully detected in the first frame and all subsequent frames, and tracking is done by associating detection results. Performing object detection and object tracking through a single network remains a challenging open question. We propose a novel network structure named trackNet that can directly detect a 3D tube enclosin…
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
This paper explores a pragmatic approach to multiple object tracking where the main focus is to associate objects efficiently for online and realtime applications. To this end, detection quality is identified as a key factor influencing tracking performance, where changing the detector can improve tracking by up to 18.9%. Despite only using a rudimentary combination of familiar techniques such as the Kalman Filter and Hungarian algorithm for the tracking components, this approach achieves an accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art online trackers. Furthermore, due to the simplicity of our trac…
Video-mapping is the process of coherent video-projection of images, animations or movies on static objects or buildings for shows. This paper focuses on the dynamic video-mapping of the suit of a puppet being moved by its puppeteer on the theater stage. This may allow changing the costume dynamically and simulate light interaction and more. Contrary to common video-mapping, the image warping cannot be done once, offline, before the show. It must be done in real-time, and considering a non-flat projection surface, so that the video-projected suit always maps perfectly the puppet, automatically…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
Supervised and unsupervised deep trackers that rely on deep learning technologies are popular in recent years. Yet, they demand high computational complexity and a high memory cost. A green unsupervised single-object tracker, called GUSOT, that aims at object tracking for long videos under a resource-constrained environment is proposed in this work. Built upon a baseline tracker, UHP-SOT++, which works well for short-term tracking, GUSOT contains two additional new modules: 1) lost object recovery, and 2) color-saliency-based shape proposal. They help resolve the tracking loss problem and offe…
Kyushu University（九州大学）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所（Amii））
Online updating of the object model via samples from historical frames is of great importance for accurate visual object tracking. Recent works mainly focus on constructing effective and efficient updating methods while neglecting the training samples for learning discriminative object models, which is also a key part of a learning problem. In this paper, we propose the DeepMix that takes historical samples' embeddings as input and generates augmented embeddings online, enhancing the state-of-the-art online learning methods for visual object tracking. More specifically, we first propose the on…
We propose a novel top-down approach that tackles the problem of multi-person human pose estimation and tracking in videos. In contrast to existing top-down approaches, our method is not limited by the performance of its person detector and can predict the poses of person instances not localized. It achieves this capability by propagating known person locations forward and backward in time and searching for poses in those regions. Our approach consists of three components: (i) a Clip Tracking Network that performs body joint detection and tracking simultaneously on small video clips; (ii) a Vi…
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 o…
Tracking and identifying players is an important problem in computer vision based ice hockey analytics. Player tracking is a challenging problem since the motion of players in hockey is fast-paced and non-linear. There is also significant player-player and player-board occlusion, camera panning and zooming in hockey broadcast video. Prior published research perform player tracking with the help of handcrafted features for player detection and re-identification. Although commercial solutions for hockey player tracking exist, to the best of our knowledge, no network architectures used, training …
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Object tracking is a hot topic in computer vision. Thanks to the booming of the very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing techniques, it is now possible to track targets of interests in satellite videos. However, since the targets in the satellite videos are usually too small compared with the entire image, and too similar with the background, most state-of-the-art algorithms failed to track the target in satellite videos with a satisfactory accuracy. Due to the fact that optical flow shows the great potential to detect even the slight movement of the targets, we proposed a multi-frame optical…
Most online multi-object trackers perform object detection stand-alone in a neural net without any input from tracking. In this paper, we present a new online joint detection and tracking model, TraDeS (TRAck to DEtect and Segment), exploiting tracking clues to assist detection end-to-end. TraDeS infers object tracking offset by a cost volume, which is used to propagate previous object features for improving current object detection and segmentation. Effectiveness and superiority of TraDeS are shown on 4 datasets, including MOT (2D tracking), nuScenes (3D tracking), MOTS and Youtube-VIS (insta…
Global optimization algorithms have shown impressive performance in data-association based multi-object tracking, but handling online data remains a difficult hurdle to overcome. In this paper, we present a hybrid data association framework with a min-cost multi-commodity network flow for robust online multi-object tracking. We build local target-specific models interleaved with global optimization of the optimal data association over multiple video frames. More specifically, in the min-cost multi-commodity network flow, the target-specific similarities are online learned to enforce the local …
Multiple Object Tracking in Video SAR: A Benchmark and Tracking Baseline
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学电子信息工程学院）；Beijing Institute of Control and Electronics Technology（北京控制与电子技术研究所）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；CSA Intellicloud Ltd（CSA 智云有限公司）；Remark Holdings（Remark Holdings公司）
Deep learning based visual trackers entail offline pre-training on large volumes of video datasets with accurate bounding box annotations that are labor-expensive to achieve. We present a new framework to facilitate bounding box annotations for video sequences, which investigates a selection-and-refinement strategy to automatically improve the preliminary annotations generated by tracking algorithms. A temporal assessment network (T-Assess Net) is proposed which is able to capture the temporal coherence of target locations and select reliable tracking results by measuring their quality. Meanwh…
In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object…
Robust online multi-person tracking requires the correct associations of online detection responses with existing trajectories. We address this problem by developing a novel appearance modeling approach to provide accurate appearance affinities to guide data association. In contrast to most existing algorithms that only consider the spatial structure of human appearances, we exploit the temporal dynamic characteristics within temporal appearance sequences to discriminate different persons. The temporal dynamic makes a sufficient complement to the spatial structure of varying appearances in the…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Video object segmentation (VOS) aims at pixel-level object tracking given only the annotations in the first frame. Due to the large visual variations of objects in video and the lack of training samples, it remains a difficult task despite the upsurging development of deep learning. Toward solving the VOS problem, we bring in several new insights by the proposed unified framework consisting of object proposal, tracking and segmentation components. The object proposal network transfers objectness information as generic knowledge into VOS; the tracking network identifies the target object from t…
Surveillance videos often suffer from blur and exposure distortions that occur during acquisition and storage, which can adversely influence following automatic image analysis results on video-analytic tasks. The purpose of this paper is to deploy an algorithm that can automatically assess the presence of exposure distortion in videos. In this work we to design and build one architecture for deep learning applied to recognition of distortions in a video. The goal is to know if the video present exposure distortions. Such an algorithm could be used to enhance or restoration image or to create a…
Target tracking in hyperspectral videos is a new research topic. In this paper, a novel method based on convolutional network and Kernelized Correlation Filter (KCF) framework is presented for tracking objects of interest in hyperspectral videos. We extract a set of normalized three-dimensional cubes from the target region as fixed convolution filters which contain spectral information surrounding a target. The feature maps generated by convolutional operations are combined to form a three-dimensional representation of an object, thereby providing effective encoding of local spectral-spatial i…
Real-time Video Target Tracking Algorithm Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Northern Arizona University（北亚利桑那大学）
Inter-frame Coding plays significant role for video Compression and Computer Vision. Computer vision systems have been incorporated in many real life applications (e.g. surveillance systems, medical imaging, robot navigation and identity verification systems). Object tracking is a key computer vision topic, which aims at detecting the position of a moving object from a video sequence. The application of Inter-frame Coding for low frame rate video, as well as for low resolution video. Various methods based on Top-down approach just like kernel based or mean shift technique are used to track the…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
State-of-the-art object detectors and trackers are developing fast. Trackers are in general more efficient than detectors but bear the risk of drifting. A question is hence raised -- how to improve the accuracy of video object detection/tracking by utilizing the existing detectors and trackers within a given time budget? A baseline is frame skipping -- detecting every N-th frames and tracking for the frames in between. This baseline, however, is suboptimal since the detection frequency should depend on the tracking quality. To this end, we propose a scheduler network, which determines to detec…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with instances of the same object class across different videos, a role n…
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）
We design a fast car detection and tracking algorithm for traffic monitoring fisheye video mounted on crossroads. We use ICIP 2020 VIP Cup dataset and adopt YOLOv5 as the object detection base model. The nighttime video of this dataset is very challenging, and the detection accuracy (AP50) of the base model is about 54%. We design a reliable car detection and tracking algorithm based on the concept of bounding box propagation among frames, which provides 17.9 percentage points (pp) and 6.2 pp. accuracy improvement over the base model for the nighttime and daytime videos, respectively. To speed…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；The Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Multiple-object tracking and behavior analysis have been the essential parts of surveillance video analysis for public security and urban management. With billions of surveillance video captured all over the world, multiple-object tracking and behavior analysis by manual labor are cumbersome and cost expensive. Due to the rapid development of deep learning algorithms in recent years, automatic object tracking and behavior analysis put forward an urgent demand on a large scale well-annotated surveillance video dataset that can reflect the diverse, congested, and complicated scenarios in real ap…
Video annotation is expensive and time consuming. Consequently, datasets for multi-person pose estimation and tracking are less diverse and have more sparse annotations compared to large scale image datasets for human pose estimation. This makes it challenging to learn deep learning based models for associating keypoints across frames that are robust to nuisance factors such as motion blur and occlusions for the task of multi-person pose tracking. To address this issue, we propose an approach that relies on keypoint correspondences for associating persons in videos. Instead of training the net…
In this paper, we propose a robust object tracking algorithm based on a branch selection mechanism to choose the most efficient object representations from multi-branch siamese networks. While most deep learning trackers use a single CNN for target representation, the proposed Multi-Branch Siamese Tracker (MBST) employs multiple branches of CNNs pre-trained for different tasks, and used for various target representations in our tracking method. With our branch selection mechanism, the appropriate CNN branch is selected depending on the target characteristics in an online manner. By using the m…
Online tracking of human activity against a complex background is a challenging task for many applications. In this paper, we have developed a robust technique for localizing skin colour regions from unconstrained image frames. A simple and fast segmentation algorithm is used to train a multiplayer perceptron (MLP) for detection of skin colours. Stepper motors are synchronized with the MLP to track the movement of the skin colour regions.
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）
Multiple object tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision due to difficulty in dealing with motion prediction, occlusion handling, and object re-identification. Many recent algorithms use motion and appearance cues to overcome these challenges. But using appearance cues increases the computation cost notably and therefore the speed of the algorithm decreases significantly which makes them inappropriate for online applications. In contrast, there are algorithms that only use motion cues to increase speed, especially for online applications. But these algorithms cannot handle occlusio…
We introduce a method for simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances in a video sequence. Our method, named MaskProp, adapts the popular Mask R-CNN to video by adding a mask propagation branch that propagates frame-level object instance masks from each video frame to all the other frames in a video clip. This allows our system to predict clip-level instance tracks with respect to the object instances segmented in the middle frame of the clip. Clip-level instance tracks generated densely for each frame in the sequence are finally aggregated to produce video-level objec…
We present a multiple-person tracking algorithm, based on combining particle filters and RVO, an agent-based crowd model that infers collision-free velocities so as to predict pedestrian's motion. In addition to position and velocity, our tracking algorithm can estimate the internal goals (desired destination or desired velocity) of the tracked pedestrian in an online manner, thus removing the need to specify this information beforehand. Furthermore, we leverage the longer-term predictions of RVO by deriving a higher-order particle filter, which aggregates multiple predictions from different p…
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Object segmentation and object tracking are fundamental research area in the computer vision community. These two topics are diffcult to handle some common challenges, such as occlusion, deformation, motion blur, and scale variation. The former contains heterogeneous object, interacting object, edge ambiguity, and shape complexity. And the latter suffers from difficulties in handling fast motion, out-of-view, and real-time processing. Combining the two problems of video object segmentation and tracking (VOST) can overcome their respective difficulties and improve their performance. VOST can be…
Multi-person tracking plays a critical role in the analysis of surveillance video. However, most existing work focus on shorter-term (e.g. minute-long or hour-long) video sequences. Therefore, we propose a multi-person tracking algorithm for very long-term (e.g. month-long) multi-camera surveillance scenarios. Long-term tracking is challenging because 1) the apparel/appearance of the same person will vary greatly over multiple days and 2) a person will leave and re-enter the scene numerous times. To tackle these challenges, we leverage face recognition information, which is robust to apparel c…
We present a simple, real-time approach for pupil tracking from live video on mobile devices. Our method extends a state-of-the-art face mesh detector with two new components: a tiny neural network that predicts positions of the pupils in 2D, and a displacement-based estimation of the pupil blend shape coefficients. Our technique can be used to accurately control the pupil movements of a virtual puppet, and lends liveliness and energy to it. The proposed approach runs at over 50 FPS on modern phones, and enables its usage in any real-time puppeteering pipeline.
Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；CITIC（CITIC（计算机技术与系统研究中心））
Tracking people in a video sequence is a challenging task that has been approached from many perspectives. This task becomes even more complicated when the person to track is a player in a broadcasted sport event, the reasons being the existence of difficulties such as frequent camera movements or switches, total and partial occlusions between players, and blurry frames due to the codification algorithm of the video. This paper introduces a player tracking solution which is both fast and accurate. This allows to track a player precisely in real-time. The approach combines several models that a…
University of South Australia（南澳大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科技集团）
One of the challenges in evaluating multi-object video detection, tracking and classification systems is having publically available data sets with which to compare different systems. However, the measures of performance for tracking and classification are different. Data sets that are suitable for evaluating tracking systems may not be appropriate for classification. Tracking video data sets typically only have ground truth track IDs, while classification video data sets only have ground truth class-label IDs. The former identifies the same object over multiple frames, while the latter identi…
Tracking pixels in videos is typically studied as an optical flow estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a displacement vector that locates it in the next frame. Even though wider temporal context is freely available, prior efforts to take this into account have yielded only small gains over 2-frame methods. In this paper, we revisit Sand and Teller's "particle video" approach, and study pixel tracking as a long-range motion estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a trajectory that locates it in multiple future frames. We re-build this classic approach using co…
An increasing number of methods for background subtraction use Robust PCA to identify sparse foreground objects. While many algorithms use the L1-norm as a convex relaxation of the ideal sparsifying function, we approach the problem with a smoothed Lp-norm and present pROST, a method for robust online subspace tracking. The algorithm is based on alternating minimization on manifolds. Implemented on a graphics processing unit it achieves realtime performance. Experimental results on a state-of-the-art benchmark for background subtraction on real-world video data indicate that the method succeed…
