Event cameras, which are asynchronous bio-inspired vision sensors, have shown great potential in a variety of situations, such as fast motion and low illumination scenes. However, most of the event-based object tracking methods are designed for scenarios with untextured objects and uncluttered backgrounds. There are few event-based object tracking methods that support bounding box-based object tracking. The main idea behind this work is to propose an asynchronous Event-based Tracking-by-Detection (ETD) method for generic bounding box-based object tracking. To achieve this goal, we present an Adaptive Time-Surface with Linear Time Decay (ATSLTD) event-to-frame conversion algorithm, which asynchronously and effectively warps the spatio-temporal information of asynchronous retinal events to a sequence of ATSLTD frames with clear object contours. We feed the sequence of ATSLTD frames to the proposed ETD method to perform accurate and efficient object tracking, which leverages the high temporal resolution property of event cameras. We compare the proposed ETD method with seven popular object tracking methods, that are based on conventional cameras or event cameras, and two variants of ETD. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed ETD method in handling various challenging environments.
Asynchronous Multi-Object Tracking with an Event Camera
Systems Theory and Robotics Group, Australian National University（系统理论与机器人组，澳大利亚国立大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科学与技术组）；Centre for Advanced Defence Research in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CADR-RAS) project UA216424-S08（机器人与自主系统高级国防研究中心（CADR-RAS）项目UA216424-S08）
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
The Asynchronous Time-based Image Sensor (ATIS) and the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) are both neuromorphic technologies that "unconventionally" use binary spikes to represent information. The ATIS produces spikes to represent the change in light falling on the sensor, and the SpiNNaker is a massively parallel computing platform that asynchronously sends spikes between cores for processing. In this demonstration we show these two hardware used together to perform a visual tracking task. We aim to show the hardware and software architecture that integrates the ATIS and SpiNNak…
Event cameras, which are asynchronous bio-inspired vision sensors, have shown great potential in computer vision and artificial intelligence. However, the application of event cameras to object-level motion estimation or tracking is still in its infancy. The main idea behind this work is to propose a novel deep neural network to learn and regress a parametric object-level motion/transform model for event-based object tracking. To achieve this goal, we propose a synchronous Time-Surface with Linear Time Decay (TSLTD) representation, which effectively encodes the spatio-temporal information of a…
Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology（印度空间科学技术研究院）
Visual Object tracking research has undergone significant improvement in the past few years. The emergence of tracking by detection approach in tracking paradigm has been quite successful in many ways. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have been extensively used in most successful trackers. Yet, the standard approach has been based on correlation or feature selection with minimal consideration given to motion consistency. Thus, there is still a need to capture various physical constraints through motion consistency which will improve accuracy, robustness and more importantly rotatio…
Current convolutional neural networks algorithms for video object tracking spend the same amount of computation for each object and video frame. However, it is harder to track an object in some frames than others, due to the varying amount of clutter, scene complexity, amount of motion, and object's distinctiveness against its background. We propose a depth-adaptive convolutional Siamese network that performs video tracking adaptively at multiple neural network depths. Parametric gating functions are trained to control the depth of the convolutional feature extractor by minimizing a joint loss…
Temple University（天普大学）；HiScene Information Technologies（海深信息科技）；Toyota Research Institute, North America（丰田北美研究院）
Object tracking is a long standing problem in vision. While great efforts have been spent to improve tracking performance, a simple yet reliable prior knowledge is left unexploited: the target object in tracking must be an object other than non-object. The recently proposed and popularized objectness measure provides a natural way to model such prior in visual tracking. Thus motivated, in this paper we propose to adapt objectness for visual object tracking. Instead of directly applying an existing objectness measure that is generic and handles various objects and environments, we adapt it to b…
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 …
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…
Sparse representation has been widely studied in visual tracking, which has shown promising tracking performance. Despite a lot of progress, the visual tracking problem is still a challenging task due to appearance variations over time. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse tracking algorithm that well addresses temporal appearance changes, by enforcing template representability and temporal consistency (TRAC). By modeling temporal consistency, our algorithm addresses the issue of drifting away from a tracking target. By exploring the templates' long-term-short-term representability, the pr…
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…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
Object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo drastic appearance changes over time. Recently, adaptive correlation filters have been successfully applied to object tracking. However, tracking algorithms relying on highly adaptive correlation filters are prone to drift due to noisy updates. Moreover, as these algorithms do not maintain long-term memory of target appearance, they cannot recover from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or target disappearance in the camera view. In this paper, we propose to learn multiple adaptive correlation filters with both long-term a…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Jiangnan University（江南大学）
Siamese approaches have achieved promising performance in visual object tracking recently. The key to the success of Siamese trackers is to learn appearance-invariant feature embedding functions via pair-wise offline training on large-scale video datasets. However, the Siamese paradigm uses one-shot learning to model the online tracking task, which impedes online adaptation in the tracking process. Additionally, the uncertainty of an online tracking response is not measured, leading to the problem of ignoring potential failures. In this paper, we advocate online adaptation in the tracking stag…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
In this paper, we propose the methods to handle temporal errors during multi-object tracking. Temporal error occurs when objects are occluded or noisy detections appear near the object. In those situations, tracking may fail and various errors like drift or ID-switching occur. It is hard to overcome temporal errors only by using motion and shape information. So, we propose the historical appearance matching method and joint-input siamese network which was trained by 2-step process. It can prevent tracking failures although objects are temporally occluded or last matching information is unrelia…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息科学与工程学院）
Recently, some correlation filter based trackers with detection proposals have achieved state-of-the-art tracking results. However, a large number of redundant proposals given by the proposal generator may degrade the performance and speed of these trackers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive proposal selection algorithm which can generate a small number of high-quality proposals to handle the problem of scale variations for visual object tracking. Specifically, we firstly utilize the color histograms in the HSV color space to represent the instances (i.e., the initial target in the first f…
Visual object tracking with RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) spectra available, shorted in RGBT tracking, is a novel and challenging research topic which draws increasing attention nowadays. In this paper, we propose an RGBT tracker which takes spatio-temporal clues into account for robust appearance model learning, and simultaneously, constructs an adaptive fusion sub-network for cross-modal interactions. Unlike most existing RGBT trackers that implement object tracking tasks with only spatial information included, temporal information is further considered in this method. Specifically, differe…
Yazd University（亚兹德大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Due to the automatic feature extraction procedure via multi-layer nonlinear transformations, the deep learning-based visual trackers have recently achieved great success in challenging scenarios for visual tracking purposes. Although many of those trackers utilize the feature maps from pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the effects of selecting different models and exploiting various combinations of their feature maps are still not compared completely. To the best of our knowledge, all those methods use a fixed number of convolutional feature maps without considering the scene a…
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Event cameras, i.e., the Dynamic and Active-pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) ones, capture the intensity changes in the scene and generates a stream of events in an asynchronous fashion. The output rate of such cameras can reach up to 10 million events per second in high dynamic environments. DAVIS cameras use novel vision sensors that mimic human eyes. Their attractive attributes, such as high output rate, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and high pixel bandwidth, make them an ideal solution for applications that require high-frequency tracking. Moreover, applications that operate in challenging lighting…
Star trackers are state-of-the-art attitude estimation devices which function by recognising and tracking star patterns. Most commercial star trackers use conventional optical sensors. A recent alternative is to use event sensors, which could enable more energy efficient and faster star trackers. However, this demands new algorithms that can efficiently cope with high-speed asynchronous data, and are feasible on resource-constrained computing platforms. To this end, we propose an event-based processing approach for star tracking. Our technique operates on the event stream from a star field, by…
We present a method that leverages the complementarity of event cameras and standard cameras to track visual features with low-latency. Event cameras are novel sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes, called "events". They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, because the same scene pattern can produce different events depending on the motion direction, establishing event correspondences across time is challenging. By contrast, standard cameras provide intensity measu…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Institute for Advanced Computer Studies（高级计算机研究所）
Event-based vision sensors, such as the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), are ideally suited for real-time motion analysis. The unique properties encompassed in the readings of such sensors provide high temporal resolution, superior sensitivity to light and low latency. These properties provide the grounds to estimate motion extremely reliably in the most sophisticated scenarios but they come at a price - modern event-based vision sensors have extremely low resolution and produce a lot of noise. Moreover, the asynchronous nature of the event stream calls for novel algorithms. This paper presents a …
School of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University（江南大学物联网工程学院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
The Discriminative Correlation Filter (CF) uses a circulant convolution operation to provide several training samples for the design of a classifier that can distinguish the target from the background. The filter design may be interfered by objects close to the target during the tracking process, resulting in tracking failure. This paper proposes an adaptive distraction context aware tracking algorithm to solve this problem. In the response map obtained for the previous frame by the CF algorithm, we adaptively find the image blocks that are similar to the target and use them as negative sample…
Event cameras can capture pixel-level illumination changes with very high temporal resolution and dynamic range. They have received increasing research interest due to their robustness to lighting conditions and motion blur. Two main approaches exist in the literature to feed the event-based processing algorithms: packaging the triggered events in event packages and sending them one-by-one as single events. These approaches suffer limitations from either processing overflow or lack of responsivity. Processing overflow is caused by high event generation rates when the algorithm cannot process a…
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…
Changchun University of Science and Technology（长春理工大学）；Universidad Complutense（马德里康普顿斯大学）；Zhejiang Saisi Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.（浙江赛思电子科技有限公司）
Visual-based target tracking is easily influenced by multiple factors, such as background clutter, targets fast-moving, illumination variation, object shape change, occlusion, etc. These factors influence the tracking accuracy of a target tracking task. To address this issue, an efficient real-time target tracking method based on a low-dimension adaptive feature fusion is proposed to allow us the simultaneous implementation of the high-accuracy and real-time target tracking. First, the adaptive fusion of a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature and color feature is utilized to improve th…
Hyperspectral cameras can provide unique spectral signatures for consistently distinguishing materials that can be used to solve surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hyperspectral likelihood maps-aided tracking method (HLT) inspired by an adaptive hyperspectral sensor. A moving object tracking system generally consists of registration, object detection, and tracking modules. We focus on the target detection part and remove the necessity to build any offline classifiers and tune a large amount of hyperparameters, instead learning a generative target model in an online…
FACT: Feature Adaptive Continual-learning Tracker for Multiple Object Tracking
School of Electrical and Electricity Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；Shien-Ming Wu School of Intelligent Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学伍舜德智能工程学院）；National Subsea Centre, Robert Gordon University（罗伯特戈登大学国家深海中心）
Recently, many multi-stream gaze estimation methods have been proposed. They estimate gaze from eye and face appearances and achieve reasonable accuracy. However, most of the methods simply concatenate the features extracted from eye and face appearance. The feature fusion process has been ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Feature Fusion Network (AFF-Net), which performs gaze tracking task in mobile tablets. We stack two-eye feature maps and utilize Squeeze-and-Excitation layers to adaptively fuse two-eye features according to their similarity on appearance. Meanwhile, we als…
Real-time tracking is an important problem in computer vision in which most methods are based on the conventional cameras. Neuromorphic vision is a concept defined by incorporating neuromorphic vision sensors such as silicon retinas in vision processing system. With the development of the silicon technology, asynchronous event-based silicon retinas that mimic neuro-biological architectures has been developed in recent years. In this work, we combine the vision tracking algorithm of computer vision with the information encoding mechanism of event-based sensors which is inspired from the neural …
This paper presents a novel approach to improve the accuracy of tracking multiple objects in a static scene using a particle filter system by introducing a data association step, a state queue for the collection of tracked objects and adaptive parameters to the system. The data association step makes use of the object detection phase and appearance model to determine if the approximated targets given by the particle filter step match the given set of detected objects. The remaining detected objects are used as information to instantiate new objects for tracking. State queues are also used for …
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Recently, the compressive tracking (CT) method has attracted much attention due to its high efficiency, but it cannot well deal with the large scale target appearance variations due to its data-independent random projection matrix that results in less discriminative features. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an adaptive CT approach, which selects the most discriminative features to design an effective appearance model. Our method significantly improves CT in three aspects: Firstly, the most discriminative features are selected via an online vector boosting method. Secondly, the …
Real-time hand articulations tracking is important for many applications such as interacting with virtual / augmented reality devices or tablets. However, most of existing algorithms highly rely on expensive and high power-consuming GPUs to achieve real-time processing. Consequently, these systems are inappropriate for mobile and wearable devices. In this paper, we propose an efficient hand tracking system which does not require high performance GPUs. In our system, we track hand articulations by minimizing discrepancy between depth map from sensor and computer-generated hand model. We also in…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Uber Advanced Technologies Group（优步先进技术集团）
Existing multi-camera SLAM systems assume synchronized shutters for all cameras, which is often not the case in practice. In this work, we propose a generalized multi-camera SLAM formulation which accounts for asynchronous sensor observations. Our framework integrates a continuous-time motion model to relate information across asynchronous multi-frames during tracking, local mapping, and loop closing. For evaluation, we collected AMV-Bench, a challenging new SLAM dataset covering 482 km of driving recorded using our asynchronous multi-camera robotic platform. AMV-Bench is over an order of magn…
Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Visual tracking is adopted to extensive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-related applications, which leads to a highly demanding requirement on the robustness of UAV trackers. However, adding imperceptible perturbations can easily fool the tracker and cause tracking failures. This risk is often overlooked and rarely researched at present. Therefore, to help increase awareness of the potential risk and the robustness of UAV tracking, this work proposes a novel adaptive adversarial attack approach, i.e., Ad$^2$Attack, against UAV object tracking. Specifically, adversarial examples are generated onl…
CADENet: Condition-Adaptive Asynchronous Dual-Stream Enhancement Network for Adverse Weather Perception in Autonomous Driving
Computer Science & Engineering Department, German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt（德国开罗大学（GUC）计算机科学与工程系，埃及）；C-DRiVeS Lab: Cognitive Driving Research in Vehicular Systems, Cairo, Egypt（认知驾驶系统实验室（C-DRiVeS Lab），开罗，埃及）
