We consider the problem of tracking an unknown small target from aerial videos of medium to high altitudes. This is a challenging problem, which is even more pronounced in unavoidable scenarios of drastic camera motion and high density. To address this problem, we introduce a context-aware IoU-guided tracker (COMET) that exploits a multitask two-stream network and an offline reference proposal generation strategy. The proposed network fully exploits target-related information by multi-scale feature learning and attention modules. The proposed strategy introduces an efficient sampling strategy to generalize the network on the target and its parts without imposing extra computational complexity during online tracking. These strategies contribute considerably in handling significant occlusions and viewpoint changes. Empirically, COMET outperforms the state-of-the-arts in a range of aerial view datasets that focusing on tracking small objects. Specifically, COMET outperforms the celebrated ATOM tracker by an average margin of 6.2% (and 7%) in precision (and success) score on challenging benchmarks of UAVDT, VisDrone-2019, and Small-90.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
Adversarial attack arises due to the vulnerability of deep neural networks to perceive input samples injected with imperceptible perturbations. Recently, adversarial attack has been applied to visual object tracking to evaluate the robustness of deep trackers. Assuming that the model structures of deep trackers are known, a variety of white-box attack approaches to visual tracking have demonstrated promising results. However, the model knowledge about deep trackers is usually unavailable in real applications. In this paper, we propose a decision-based black-box attack method for visual object …
Guangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学广州研究院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）理学院）；School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学计算技术学院）；National Center for Applied Mathematics, Chongqing Normal University（重庆师范大学国家应用数学中心）
Most existing trackers are based on using a classifier and multi-scale estimation to estimate the target state. Consequently, and as expected, trackers have become more stable while tracking accuracy has stagnated. While trackers adopt a maximum overlap method based on an intersection-over-union (IoU) loss to mitigate this problem, there are defects in the IoU loss itself, that make it impossible to continue to optimize the objective function when a given bounding box is completely contained within/without another bounding box; this makes it very challenging to accurately estimate the target s…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Network System and Network Culture（网络系统与网络文化北京市重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Interactive Technology and Experience System Ministry of Culture and Tourism（交互技术与体验系统文化和旅游部重点实验室）
The critical challenge in tracking-by-detection framework is how to avoid drift problem during online learning, where the robust features for a variety of appearance changes are difficult to be learned and a reasonable intersection over union (IoU) threshold that defines the true/false positives is hard to set. This paper presents the TCDCaps method to address the problems above via a cascaded dense capsule architecture. To get robust features, we extend original capsules with dense-connected routing, which are referred as DCaps. Depending on the preservation of part-whole relationships in the…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）
Current Siamese-based trackers mainly formulate the visual tracking into two independent subtasks, including classification and localization. They learn the classification subnetwork by processing each sample separately and neglect the relationship among positive and negative samples. Moreover, such tracking paradigm takes only the classification confidence of proposals for the final prediction, which may yield the misalignment between classification and localization. To resolve these issues, this paper proposes a ranking-based optimization algorithm to explore the relationship among different…
The CenterTrack tracking algorithm achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance using a simple detection model and single-frame spatial offsets to localize objects and predict their associations in a single network. However, this joint detection and tracking method still suffers from high identity switches due to the inferior association method. To reduce the high number of identity switches and improve the tracking accuracy, in this paper, we propose to incorporate a simple tracked object bounding box and overlapping prediction based on the current frame onto the CenterTrack algorithm. Spec…
Detecting and tracking vehicles in urban scenes is a crucial step in many traffic-related applications as it helps to improve road user safety among other benefits. Various challenges remain unresolved in multi-object tracking (MOT) including target information description, long-term occlusions and fast motion. We propose a multi-vehicle detection and tracking system following the tracking-by-detection paradigm that tackles the previously mentioned challenges. Our MOT method extends an Intersection-over-Union (IOU)-based tracker with vehicle re-identification features. This allows us to utiliz…
View-Centric Multi-Object Tracking with Homographic Matching in Moving UAV
MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Perception and Cognition, University of Science and Technology of China（脑启发智能感知与认知教育部重点实验室，中国科学技术大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）
Existing Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods design complex architectures for better tracking performance. However, without a proper organization of input information, they still fail to perform tracking robustly and suffer from frequent identity switches. In this paper, we propose two novel methods together with a simple online Message Passing Network (MPN) to address these limitations. First, we explore different integration methods for the graph node and edge embeddings and put forward a new IoU (Intersection over Union) guided function, which improves long term tracking and handles iden…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）；LG Electronics（LG电子）；University of Regina（里贾纳大学）
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 merg…
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is an important and practical task related to both surveillance systems and moving camera applications, such as autonomous driving and robotic vision. However, due to unreliable detection, occlusion and fast camera motion, tracked targets can be easily lost, which makes MOT very challenging. Most recent works treat tracking as a re-identification (Re-ID) task, but how to combine appearance and temporal features is still not well addressed. In this paper, we propose an innovative and effective tracking method called TrackletNet Tracker (TNT) that combines temporal an…
FishMOT: A Simple and Effective Method for Fish Tracking Based on IoU Matching
School of Information Engineering, Dalian Ocean University（大连海洋大学信息工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Environment Controlled Aquaculture, Ministry of Education, Dalian Ocean University（大连海洋大学（教育部）环境控制水产养殖重点实验室）
Objects moving at high speed along complex trajectories often appear in videos, especially videos of sports. Such objects elapse non-negligible distance during exposure time of a single frame and therefore their position in the frame is not well defined. They appear as semi-transparent streaks due to the motion blur and cannot be reliably tracked by standard trackers. We propose a novel approach called Tracking by Deblatting based on the observation that motion blur is directly related to the intra-frame trajectory of an object. Blur is estimated by solving two intertwined inverse problems, bl…
CRTrack: Low-Light Semi-Supervised Multi-object Tracking Based on Consistency Regularization
School of Software Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学软件学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学信息科学与工程学院）
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
The current Siamese network based on region proposal network (RPN) has attracted great attention in visual tracking due to its excellent accuracy and high efficiency. However, the design of the RPN involves the selection of the number, scale, and aspect ratios of anchor boxes, which will affect the applicability and convenience of the model. Furthermore, these anchor boxes require complicated calculations, such as calculating their intersection-over-union (IoU) with ground truth bounding boxes.Due to the problems related to anchor boxes, we propose a simple yet effective anchor-free tracker (n…
VastMAT: A Large-Scale Multi-Category Benchmark for Multi-Animal Tracking
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Gwangju Institute of Technology（光州科学技术院）；Hyundai Motor Company（现代汽车公司）；SI Analytics Co., Ltd.（SI Analytics有限公司）；Korea University（高丽大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院）
In this paper, we propose a highly practical fully online multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) method that uses instance segmentation results as an input. The proposed method is based on the Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GMPHD) filter, a hierarchical data association (HDA), and a mask-based affinity fusion (MAF) model to achieve high-performance online tracking. The HDA consists of two associations: segment-to-track and track-to-track associations. One affinity, for position and motion, is computed by using the GMPHD filter, and the other affinity, for appearance is…
Curtin University（科廷大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
This paper examines performance evaluation criteria for basic vision tasks involving sets of objects namely, object detection, instance-level segmentation and multi-object tracking. The rankings of algorithms by an existing criterion can fluctuate with different choices of parameters, e.g. Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold, making their evaluations unreliable. More importantly, there is no means to verify whether we can trust the evaluations of a criterion. This work suggests a notion of trustworthiness for performance criteria, which requires (i) robustness to parameters for reliability…
GTATrack: Winner Solution to SoccerTrack 2025 with Deep-EIoU and Global Tracklet Association
Institute of Intelligent Systems\ of AI, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Tainan Taiwan；Department of Computer Science , National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Hsinchu Taiwan；Technology National Central University Taoyuan Taiwan；Institute of Data Science\ Cheng Kung University Tainan Taiwan；Miin Wu School of Computing\ Cheng Kung University Tainan Taiwan；Institute of Intelligent Systems\ of AI, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University；Department of Computer Science , National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University；Technology National Central University；Institute of Data Science\ Cheng Kung University；Miin Wu School of Computing\ Cheng Kung University
MVA 2025 Small Multi-Object Tracking for Spotting Birds Challenge: Dataset, Methods, and Results
Toyota Motor Corporation（丰田汽车公司）；Toyota Technological Institute（丰田技术研究所）；Iwate Prefecture Coastal Regional Development Bureau（岩手县沿海地区发展局）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National Cheng Kung University（国立成功大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；National Institute of Technology Oita College（国立Oita技术学院）；Axelspace Corporation（Axelspace公司）
We introduce a tracking-by-detection method that integrates a deep object detector with a particle filter tracker under the regularization framework where the tracked object is represented by a sparse dictionary. A novel observation model which establishes consensus between the detector and tracker is formulated that enables us to update the dictionary with the guidance of the deep detector. This yields an efficient representation of the object appearance through the video sequence hence improves robustness to occlusion and pose changes. Moreover we propose a new state vector consisting of tra…
Human activity recognition in videos is a challenging problem that has drawn a lot of interest, particularly when the goal requires the analysis of a large video database. AOLME project provides a collaborative learning environment for middle school students to explore mathematics, computer science, and engineering by processing digital images and videos. As part of this project, around 2200 hours of video data was collected for analysis. Because of the size of the dataset, it is hard to analyze all the videos of the dataset manually. Thus, there is a huge need for reliable computer-based meth…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）；Tufts University School of Medicine（塔夫茨大学医学院）
Feature tracking Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) has recently emerged as an area of interest for quantification of regional cardiac function from balanced, steady state free precession (SSFP) cine sequences. However, currently available techniques lack full automation, limiting reproducibility. We propose a fully automated technique whereby a CMR image sequence is first segmented with a deep, fully convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, and quadratic basis splines are fitted simultaneously across all cardiac frames using least squares optimization. Experiments are performed using da…
Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）；Czech Academy of Sciences（捷克科学院）
Tracking by Deblatting stands for solving an inverse problem of deblurring and image matting for tracking motion-blurred objects. We propose non-causal Tracking by Deblatting which estimates continuous, complete and accurate object trajectories. Energy minimization by dynamic programming is used to detect abrupt changes of motion, called bounces. High-order polynomials are fitted to segments, which are parts of the trajectory separated by bounces. The output is a continuous trajectory function which assigns location for every real-valued time stamp from zero to the number of frames. Additional…
In training object detector based on convolutional neural networks, selection of effective positive examples for training is an important factor. However, when training an anchor-based detectors with sparse annotations on an image, effort to find effective positive examples can hinder training performance. When using the anchor-based training for the ground truth bounding box to collect positive examples under given IoU, it is often possible to include objects from other classes in the current training class, or objects that are needed to be trained can only be sampled as negative examples. We…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Inspirit IoT, Inc（英斯匹特物联网公司）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Object detection and tracking are challenging tasks for resource-constrained embedded systems. While these tasks are among the most compute-intensive tasks from the artificial intelligence domain, they are only allowed to use limited computation and memory resources on embedded devices. In the meanwhile, such resource-constrained implementations are often required to satisfy additional demanding requirements such as real-time response, high-throughput performance, and reliable inference accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose SkyNet, a hardware-efficient neural network to deliver th…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Segmentation for tracking surgical instruments plays an important role in robot-assisted surgery. Segmentation of surgical instruments contributes to capturing accurate spatial information for tracking. In this paper, a novel network, Refined Attention Segmentation Network, is proposed to simultaneously segment surgical instruments and identify their categories. The U-shape network which is popular in segmentation is used. Different from previous work, an attention module is adopted to help the network focus on key regions, which can improve the segmentation accuracy. To solve the class imbala…
Anchor-based Siamese trackers have achieved remarkable advancements in accuracy, yet the further improvement is restricted by the lagged tracking robustness. We find the underlying reason is that the regression network in anchor-based methods is only trained on the positive anchor boxes (i.e., $IoU \geq0.6$). This mechanism makes it difficult to refine the anchors whose overlap with the target objects are small. In this paper, we propose a novel object-aware anchor-free network to address this issue. First, instead of refining the reference anchor boxes, we directly predict the position and sc…
Many different species are adversely affected by poaching. In response to this escalating crisis, efforts to stop poaching using hidden cameras, drones and DNA tracking have been implemented with varying degrees of success. Limited resources, costs and logistical limitations are often the cause of most unsuccessful poaching interventions. The study presented in this paper outlines a flexible and interoperable framework for the automatic detection of animals and poaching activity to facilitate early intervention practices. Using a robust deep learning pipeline, a convolutional neural network is…
