Assigning consistent temporal identifiers to multiple moving objects in a video sequence is a challenging problem. A solution to that problem would have immediate ramifications in multiple object tracking and segmentation problems. We propose a strategy that treats the temporal identification task as a spatio-temporal clustering problem. We propose an unsupervised learning approach using a convolutional and fully connected autoencoder, which we call deep heterogeneous autoencoder, to learn discriminative features from segmentation masks and detection bounding boxes. We extract masks and their corresponding bounding boxes from a pretrained instance segmentation network and train the autoencoders jointly using task-dependent uncertainty weights to generate common latent features. We then construct constraints graphs that encourage associations among objects that satisfy a set of known temporal conditions. The feature vectors and the constraints graphs are then provided to the kmeans clustering algorithm to separate the corresponding data points in the latent space. We evaluate the performance of our method using challenging synthetic and real-world multiple-object video datasets. Our results show that our technique outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
3D multi-object tracking aims to uniquely and consistently identify all mobile entities through time. Despite the rich spatiotemporal information available in this setting, current 3D tracking methods primarily rely on abstracted information and limited history, e.g. single-frame object bounding boxes. In this work, we develop a holistic representation of traffic scenes that leverages both spatial and temporal information of the actors in the scene. Specifically, we reformulate tracking as a spatiotemporal problem by representing tracked objects as sequences of time-stamped points and bounding…
A unified metric is given for the evaluation of object tracking systems. The metric is inspired by KL-divergence or relative entropy, which is commonly used to evaluate clustering techniques. Since tracking problems are fundamentally different from clustering, the components of KL-divergence are recast to handle various types of tracking errors (i.e., false alarms, missed detections, merges, splits). Scoring results are given on a standard tracking dataset (Oxford Town Centre Dataset), as well as several simulated scenarios. Also, this new metric is compared with several other metrics includin…
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…
Multi-object tracking has seen a lot of progress recently, albeit with substantial annotation costs for developing better and larger labeled datasets. In this work, we remove the need for annotated datasets by proposing an unsupervised re-identification network, thus sidestepping the labeling costs entirely, required for training. Given unlabeled videos, our proposed method (SimpleReID) first generates tracking labels using SORT and trains a ReID network to predict the generated labels using crossentropy loss. We demonstrate that SimpleReID performs substantially better than simpler alternativ…
Object tracking is one of the most important problems in computer vision. The aim of video tracking is to extract the trajectories of a target or object of interest, i.e. accurately locate a moving target in a video sequence and discriminate target from non-targets in the feature space of the sequence. So, feature descriptors can have significant effects on such discrimination. In this paper, we use the basic idea of many trackers which consists of three main components of the reference model, i.e., object modeling, object detection and localization, and model updating. However, there are majo…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we present a simple yet fast and robust algorithm which exploits the spatio-temporal context for visual tracking. Our approach formulates the spatio-temporal relationships between the object of interest and its local context based on a Bayesian framework, which models the statistical correlation between the low-level features (i.e., image intensity and position) from the target and its surrounding regions. The tracking problem is posed by computing a confidence map, and obtaining the best target location by maximizing an object location likelihood function. The Fast Fourier Tran…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
We propose an unsupervised visual tracking method in this paper. Different from existing approaches using extensive annotated data for supervised learning, our CNN model is trained on large-scale unlabeled videos in an unsupervised manner. Our motivation is that a robust tracker should be effective in both the forward and backward predictions (i.e., the tracker can forward localize the target object in successive frames and backtrace to its initial position in the first frame). We build our framework on a Siamese correlation filter network, which is trained using unlabeled raw videos. Meanwhil…
This paper considers the problem of localizing actions in videos as a sequences of bounding boxes. The objective is to generate action proposals that are likely to include the action of interest, ideally achieving high recall with few proposals. Our contributions are threefold. First, inspired by selective search for object proposals, we introduce an approach to generate action proposals from spatiotemporal super-voxels in an unsupervised manner, we call them Tubelets. Second, along with the static features from individual frames our approach advantageously exploits motion. We introduce indepe…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Existing visual object tracking usually learns a bounding-box based template to match the targets across frames, which cannot accurately learn a pixel-wise representation, thereby being limited in handling severe appearance variations. To address these issues, much effort has been made on segmentation-based tracking, which learns a pixel-wise object-aware template and can achieve higher accuracy than bounding-box template based tracking. However, existing segmentation-based trackers are ineffective in learning the spatio-temporal correspondence across frames due to no use of the rich temporal …
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）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
The advancement of visual tracking has continuously been brought by deep learning models. Typically, supervised learning is employed to train these models with expensive labeled data. In order to reduce the workload of manual annotations and learn to track arbitrary objects, we propose an unsupervised learning method for visual tracking. The motivation of our unsupervised learning is that a robust tracker should be effective in bidirectional tracking. Specifically, the tracker is able to forward localize a target object in successive frames and backtrace to its initial position in the first fr…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Cloud AI（微软云人工智能）；International Digital Economy Academy（国际数字经济研究院）
Occlusion between different objects is a typical challenge in Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), which often leads to inferior tracking results due to the missing detected objects. The common practice in multi-object tracking is re-identifying the missed objects after their reappearance. Though tracking performance can be boosted by the re-identification, the annotation of identity is required to train the model. In addition, such practice of re-identification still can not track those highly occluded objects when they are missed by the detector. In this paper, we focus on online multi-object tracki…
In this paper, we propose a multiple object tracker, called MF-Tracker, that integrates multiple classical features (spatial distances and colours) and modern features (detection labels and re-identification features) in its tracking framework. Since our tracker can work with detections coming either from unsupervised and supervised object detectors, we also investigated the impact of supervised and unsupervised detection inputs in our method and for tracking road users in general. We also compared our results with existing methods that were applied on the UA-Detrac and the UrbanTracker datase…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
In this paper, we present a new tracking architecture with an encoder-decoder transformer as the key component. The encoder models the global spatio-temporal feature dependencies between target objects and search regions, while the decoder learns a query embedding to predict the spatial positions of the target objects. Our method casts object tracking as a direct bounding box prediction problem, without using any proposals or predefined anchors. With the encoder-decoder transformer, the prediction of objects just uses a simple fully-convolutional network, which estimates the corners of objects…
Fraunhofer Center Machine Learning（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习中心）；Fraunhofer ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所）；Institute for Machine Learning and Analytics (IMLA) Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学机器学习与分析研究所（IMLA））；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a long-standing task in computer vision. Current approaches based on the tracking by detection paradigm either require some sort of domain knowledge or supervision to associate data correctly into tracks. In this work, we present an unsupervised multiple object tracking approach based on visual features and minimum cost lifted multicuts. Our method is based on straight-forward spatio-temporal cues that can be extracted from neighboring frames in an image sequences without superivison. Clustering based on these cues enables us to learn the required appearance i…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
An unsupervised, lightweight and high-performance single object tracker, called UHP-SOT, was proposed by Zhou et al. recently. As an extension, we present an enhanced version and name it UHP-SOT++ in this work. Built upon the foundation of the discriminative-correlation-filters-based (DCF-based) tracker, two new ingredients are introduced in UHP-SOT and UHP-SOT++: 1) background motion modeling and 2) object box trajectory modeling. The main difference between UHP-SOT and UHP-SOT++ is the fusion strategy of proposals from three models (i.e., DCF, background motion and object box trajectory mode…
UBATrack: Spatio-Temporal State Space Model for General Multi-Modal Tracking
Key Laboratory of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University（教育区块链与智能技术重点实验室，教育部，广西师范大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multi-Source Information Mining and Security, Guangxi Normal University（广西多源信息挖掘与安全重点实验室，广西师范大学）；University Engineering Research Center of Educational Intelligent Technology, Guangxi Normal University（教育智能技术大学工程研究中心，广西师范大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Machine Vision and Intelligent Control, Wuzhou University（广西机器视觉与智能控制重点实验室，梧州大学）
Eskisehir Technical University（埃斯基谢希尔技术大学）；Eskisehir Osmangazi University（埃斯基谢希尔奥斯曼加齐大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Robust object tracking requires knowledge of tracked objects' appearance, motion and their evolution over time. Although motion provides distinctive and complementary information especially for fast moving objects, most of the recent tracking architectures primarily focus on the objects' appearance information. In this paper, we propose a two-stream deep neural network tracker that uses both spatial and temporal features. Our architecture is developed over ATOM tracker and contains two backbones: (i) 2D-CNN network to capture appearance features and (ii) 3D-CNN network to capture motion featur…
Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extr…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Similarity matching is a core operation in Siamese trackers. Most Siamese trackers carry out similarity learning via cross correlation that originates from the image matching field. However, unlike 2-D image matching, the matching network in object tracking requires 4-D information (height, width, channel and time). Cross correlation neglects the information from channel and time dimensions, and thus produces ambiguous matching. This paper proposes a spatio-temporal matching process to thoroughly explore the capability of 4-D matching in space (height, width and channel) and time. In spatial m…
Psychological studies have found that human visual tracking system involves learning, memory, and planning. Despite recent successes, not many works have focused on memory and planning in deep learning based tracking. We are thus interested in memory augmented network, where an external memory remembers the evolving appearance of the target (foreground) object without backpropagation for updating weights. Our Dual Augmented Memory Network (DAWN) is unique in remembering both target and background, and using an improved attention LSTM memory to guide the focus on memorized features. DAWN is eff…
IMT Atlantique（IMT大西洋高等矿业电信学院）；LaTIM UMR 1101, Inserm（LaTIM（INSERM UMR 1101））；ICube UMR 7357, CNRS, Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学CNRS ICube（UMR 7357））；Université de Bretagne Occidentale（布列塔尼西部大学）
Finding correspondences between structural entities decomposing images is of high interest for computer vision applications. In particular, we analyze how to accurately track superpixels - visual primitives generated by aggregating adjacent pixels sharing similar characteristics - over extended time periods relying on unsupervised learning and temporal integration. A two-step video processing pipeline dedicated to long-term superpixel tracking is proposed. First, unsupervised learning-based superpixel matching provides correspondences between consecutive and distant frames using new context-ri…
Representation Alignment Contrastive Regularization for Multi-Object Tracking
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Big Data and Future E-Commerce Technology（浙江省大数据与未来电子商务技术重点实验室）；Zhejiang Uniview Technologies Co.,Ltd.（浙江宇视科技有限公司）
Spatio-Temporal Bi-directional Cross-frame Memory for Distractor Filtering Point Cloud Single Object Tracking
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Changchun University of Science and Technology（长春理工大学电子信息工程学院）；Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute（香港应用科技研究院）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose a self-supervised learning method to jointly reason about spatial and temporal context for video recognition. Recent self-supervised approaches have used spatial context [9, 34] as well as temporal coherency [32] but a combination of the two requires extensive preprocessing such as tracking objects through millions of video frames [59] or computing optical flow to determine frame regions with high motion [30]. We propose to combine spatial and temporal context in one self-supervised framework without any heavy preprocessing. We divide multiple video frames into grids of patches and …
STCMOT: Spatio-Temporal Cohesion Learning for UAV-Based Multiple Object Tracking
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Optics and Electronics（光电技术研究所）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Yale-NUS College（耶鲁-新加坡国立大学学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Occlusion is a long-standing problem that causes many modern tracking methods to be erroneous. In this paper, we address the occlusion problem by exploiting the current and future possible locations of the target object from its past trajectory. To achieve this, we introduce a learning-based tracking method that takes into account background motion modeling and trajectory prediction. Our trajectory prediction module predicts the target object's locations in the current and future frames based on the object's past trajectory. Since, in the input video, the target object's trajectory is not only…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
An unsupervised online object tracking method that exploits both foreground and background correlations is proposed and named UHP-SOT (Unsupervised High-Performance Single Object Tracker) in this work. UHP-SOT consists of three modules: 1) appearance model update, 2) background motion modeling, and 3) trajectory-based box prediction. A state-of-the-art discriminative correlation filters (DCF) based tracker is adopted by UHP-SOT as the first module. We point out shortcomings of using the first module alone such as failure in recovering from tracking loss and inflexibility in object box adaptati…
National Chiao Tung University（国立交通大学）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）
Stereo matching and flow estimation are two essential tasks for scene understanding, spatially in 3D and temporally in motion. Existing approaches have been focused on the unsupervised setting due to the limited resource to obtain the large-scale ground truth data. To construct a self-learnable objective, co-related tasks are often linked together to form a joint framework. However, the prior work usually utilizes independent networks for each task, thus not allowing to learn shared feature representations across models. In this paper, we propose a single and principled network to jointly lear…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Multi-object tracking is a cornerstone capability of any robotic system. The quality of tracking is largely dependent on the quality of the detector used. In many applications, such as autonomous vehicles, it is preferable to over-detect objects to avoid catastrophic outcomes due to missed detections. As a result, current state-of-the-art 3D detectors produce high rates of false-positives to ensure a low number of false-negatives. This can negatively affect tracking by making data association and track lifecycle management more challenging. Additionally, occasional false-negative detections du…
HAD: Hierarchical Asymmetric Distillation to Bridge Spatio-Temporal Gaps in Event-Based Object Tracking
Sanya Science and Education Innovation Park, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学三亚科学教育创新园）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Transportation Internet of Things, School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology（湖北省交通运输物联网重点实验室，计算机科学与人工智能学院，武汉理工大学）；State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室，北京大学）
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…
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) focuses on modeling the relationship of detected objects among consecutive frames and merge them into different trajectories. MOT remains a challenging task as noisy and confusing detection results often hinder the final performance. Furthermore, most existing research are focusing on improving detection algorithms and association strategies. As such, we propose a novel framework that can effectively predict and mask-out the noisy and confusing detection results before associating the objects into trajectories. In particular, we formulate such "bad" detection res…
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Unsupervised learning has been popular in various computer vision tasks, including visual object tracking. However, prior unsupervised tracking approaches rely heavily on spatial supervision from template-search pairs and are still unable to track objects with strong variation over a long time span. As unlimited self-supervision signals can be obtained by tracking a video along a cycle in time, we investigate evolving a Siamese tracker by tracking videos forward-backward. We present a novel unsupervised tracking framework, in which we can learn temporal correspondence both on the classificatio…
Tongji University（同济大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Most existing trackers based on discriminative correlation filters (DCF) try to introduce predefined regularization term to improve the learning of target objects, e.g., by suppressing background learning or by restricting change rate of correlation filters. However, predefined parameters introduce much effort in tuning them and they still fail to adapt to new situations that the designer did not think of. In this work, a novel approach is proposed to online automatically and adaptively learn spatio-temporal regularization term. Spatially local response map variation is introduced as spatial r…
Unsupervised 4D Cardiac Motion Tracking with Spatiotemporal Optical Flow Networks
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；DJI Technology Co., Ltd.（大疆创新科技有限公司）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳理工大学）
Efficient tracking algorithms are a crucial part of particle tracking detectors. While a lot of work has been done in designing a plethora of algorithms, these usually require tedious tuning for each use case. (Weakly) supervised Machine Learning-based approaches can leverage the actual raw data for maximal performance. Yet in realistic scenarios, sufficient high-quality labeled data is not available. While training might be performed on simulated data, the reproduction of realistic signal and noise in the detector requires substantial effort, compromising this approach. Here we propose a nove…
In this paper, we present an unsupervised probabilistic model and associated estimation algorithm for multi-object tracking (MOT) based on a dynamical variational autoencoder (DVAE), called DVAE-UMOT. The DVAE is a latent-variable deep generative model that can be seen as an extension of the variational autoencoder for the modeling of temporal sequences. It is included in DVAE-UMOT to model the objects' dynamics, after being pre-trained on an unlabeled synthetic dataset of single-object trajectories. Then the distributions and parameters of DVAE-UMOT are estimated on each multi-object sequence…
Tracking and localizing objects is a central problem in computer-assisted surgery. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be employed as an optical tracking system, due to its high spatial and temporal resolution. Recently, 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance for pose estimation of a marker object using single volumetric OCT images. While this approach relied on spatial information only, OCT allows for a temporal stream of OCT image volumes capturing the motion of an object at high volumes rates. In this work, we systematically extend 3D CNNs to 4D spatio-t…
Physical processes, camera movement, and unpredictable environmental conditions like the presence of dust can induce noise and artifacts in video feeds. We observe that popular unsupervised MOT methods are dependent on noise-free inputs. We show that the addition of a small amount of artificial random noise causes a sharp degradation in model performance on benchmark metrics. We resolve this problem by introducing a robust unsupervised multi-object tracking (MOT) model: AttU-Net. The proposed single-head attention model helps limit the negative impact of noise by learning visual representation…
In this work, we propose a novel paradigm to encode the position of targets for target tracking in videos using transformers. The proposed paradigm, Dense Spatio-Temporal (DST) position encoding, encodes spatio-temporal position information in a pixel-wise dense fashion. The provided position encoding provides location information to associate targets across frames beyond appearance matching by comparing objects in two bounding boxes. Compared to the typical transformer positional encoding, our proposed encoding is applied to the 2D CNN features instead of the projected feature vectors to avoi…
Academy of Military Medical Sciences（军事医学科学院）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) from videos is a challenging computer vision task which has been extensively studied for decades. Most of the existing MOT algorithms are based on the Tracking-by-Detection (TBD) paradigm combined with popular machine learning approaches which largely reduce the human effort to tune algorithm parameters. However, the commonly used supervised learning approaches require the labeled data (e.g., bounding boxes), which is expensive for videos. Also, the TBD framework is usually suboptimal since it is not end-to-end, i.e., it considers the task as detection and tr…
