RGB and thermal source data suffer from both shared and specific challenges, and how to explore and exploit them plays a critical role to represent the target appearance in RGBT tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel challenge-aware neural network to handle the modality-shared challenges (e.g., fast motion, scale variation and occlusion) and the modality-specific ones (e.g., illumination variation and thermal crossover) for RGBT tracking. In particular, we design several parameter-shared branches in each layer to model the target appearance under the modality-shared challenges, and several parameterindependent branches under the modality-specific ones. Based on the observation that the modality-specific cues of different modalities usually contains the complementary advantages, we propose a guidance module to transfer discriminative features from one modality to another one, which could enhance the discriminative ability of some weak modality. Moreover, all branches are aggregated together in an adaptive manner and parallel embedded in the backbone network to efficiently form more discriminative target representations. These challenge-aware branches are able to model the target appearance under certain challenges so that the target representations can be learnt by a few parameters even in the situation of insufficient training data. From the experimental results we will show that our method operates at a real-time speed while performing well against the state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets.
RGBT tracking receives a surge of interest in the computer vision community, but this research field lacks a large-scale and high-diversity benchmark dataset, which is essential for both the training of deep RGBT trackers and the comprehensive evaluation of RGBT tracking methods. To this end, we present a Large-scale High-diversity benchmark for RGBT tracking (LasHeR) in this work. LasHeR consists of 1224 visible and thermal infrared video pairs with more than 730K frame pairs in total. Each frame pair is spatially aligned and manually annotated with a bounding box, making the dataset well and…
How to perform effective information fusion of different modalities is a core factor in boosting the performance of RGBT tracking. This paper presents a novel deep fusion algorithm based on the representations from an end-to-end trained convolutional neural network. To deploy the complementarity of features of all layers, we propose a recursive strategy to densely aggregate these features that yield robust representations of target objects in each modality. In different modalities, we propose to prune the densely aggregated features of all modalities in a collaborative way. In a specific, we e…
DRGBT-1K: A Large-scale High-quality Benchmark for Dynamic RGBT Tracking
Anhui University（安徽大学）；State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology（光电子信息采集与保护技术国家重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Security Artificial Intelligence（安徽省安全人工智能重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）
AFter: Attention-based Fusion Router for RGBT Tracking
Anhui University（安徽大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）
Revisiting RGBT Tracking Benchmarks from the Perspective of Modality Validity: A New Benchmark, Problem, and Solution
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（Surrey大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
Cross-modulated Attention Transformer for RGBT Tracking
School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；iFLYTEK CO.LTD.（科大讯飞股份有限公司）
Visual object tracking with the visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) electromagnetic waves, shorted in RGBT tracking, recently draws increasing attention in the tracking community. Considering the rapid development of deep learning, a survey for the recent deep neural network based RGBT trackers is presented in this paper. Firstly, we give brief introduction for the RGBT trackers concluded into this category. Then, a comparison among the existing RGBT trackers on several challenging benchmarks is given statistically. Specifically, MDNet and Siamese architectures are the two mainstream fram…
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…
The task of RGBT tracking aims to take the complementary advantages from visible spectrum and thermal infrared data to achieve robust visual tracking, and receives more and more attention in recent years. Existing works focus on modality-specific information integration by introducing modality weights to achieve adaptive fusion or learning robust feature representations of different modalities. Although these methods could effectively deploy the modality-specific properties, they ignore the potential values of modality-shared cues as well as instance-aware information, which are crucial for ef…
Anhui University（安徽大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Low-quality modalities contain not only a lot of noisy information but also some discriminative features in RGBT tracking. However, the potentials of low-quality modalities are not well explored in existing RGBT tracking algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel duality-gated mutual condition network to fully exploit the discriminative information of all modalities while suppressing the effects of data noise. In specific, we design a mutual condition module, which takes the discriminative information of a modality as the condition to guide feature learning of target appearance in another mo…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）
For both visible and infrared images have their own advantages and disadvantages, RGBT tracking has attracted more and more attention. The key points of RGBT tracking lie in feature extraction and feature fusion of visible and infrared images. Current RGBT tracking methods mostly pay attention to both individual features (features extracted from images of a single camera) and common features (features extracted and fused from an RGB camera and a thermal camera), while pay less attention to the different and dynamic contributions of individual features and common features for different sequence…
RGBT tracking has attracted increasing attention since RGB and thermal infrared data have strong complementary advantages, which could make trackers all-day and all-weather work. However, how to effectively represent RGBT data for visual tracking remains unstudied well. Existing works usually focus on extracting modality-shared or modality-specific information, but the potentials of these two cues are not well explored and exploited in RGBT tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-adapter network to jointly perform modality-shared, modality-specific and instance-aware target represent…
Classifying the confusing samples in the course of RGBT tracking is a quite challenging problem, which hasn't got satisfied solution. Existing methods only focus on enlarging the boundary between positive and negative samples, however, the structured information of samples might be harmed, e.g., confusing positive samples are closer to the anchor than normal positive samples.To handle this problem, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning framework, named M$^5$L for RGBT tracking in this paper. In particular, we design a multi-margin structured loss to distinguish the confus…
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
We address the problem of multi-modal object tracking in video and explore various options of fusing the complementary information conveyed by the visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) modalities including pixel-level, feature-level and decision-level fusion. Specifically, different from the existing methods, paradigm of image fusion task is heeded for fusion at pixel level. Feature-level fusion is fulfilled by attention mechanism with channels excited optionally. Besides, at decision level, a novel fusion strategy is put forward since an effortless averaging configuration has shown the sup…
RAGTrack: Language-aware RGBT Tracking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation
College of Command and Control Engineering, Army Engineering University of PLA（中国人民解放军陆军工程大学指挥控制工程学院）；School of Future Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学未来技术学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学信息与通信工程学院）
This paper investigates how to perform robust visual tracking in adverse and challenging conditions using complementary visual and thermal infrared data (RGBT tracking). We propose a novel deep network architecture called qualityaware Feature Aggregation Network (FANet) for robust RGBT tracking. Unlike existing RGBT trackers, our FANet aggregates hierarchical deep features within each modality to handle the challenge of significant appearance changes caused by deformation, low illumination, background clutter and occlusion. In particular, we employ the operations of max pooling to transform th…
Dynamic Disentangled Fusion Network for RGBT Tracking
Anhui University（安徽大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Segment Any Motion with Radar: Robust Multimodal Moving-Object Segmentation and Tracking
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Great Bay University, Dongguan（大湾区大学（东莞））；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；Computer Vision Laboratory, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（inception人工智能研究院）
We propose an end-to-end tracking framework for fusing the RGB and TIR modalities in RGB-T tracking. Our baseline tracker is DiMP (Discriminative Model Prediction), which employs a carefully designed target prediction network trained end-to-end using a discriminative loss. We analyze the effectiveness of modality fusion in each of the main components in DiMP, i.e. feature extractor, target estimation network, and classifier. We consider several fusion mechanisms acting at different levels of the framework, including pixel-level, feature-level and response-level. Our tracker is trained in an en…
Towards Compact Unified Multimodal Tracking: Synergizing Knowledge Distillation with Structural Pruning
The City College of New York（纽约城市学院）；INSAIT；Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣克莱门特奥赫里德斯基索非亚大学）；Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所人工智能安全国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Peking University（北京大学）；Anhui University（安徽大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Many RGB-T trackers attempt to attain robust feature representation by utilizing an adaptive weighting scheme (or attention mechanism). Different from these works, we propose a new dynamic modality-aware filter generation module (named MFGNet) to boost the message communication between visible and thermal data by adaptively adjusting the convolutional kernels for various input images in practical tracking. Given the image pairs as input, we first encode their features with the backbone network. Then, we concatenate these feature maps and generate dynamic modality-aware filters with two indepen…
Prior correlation filter (CF)-based tracking methods for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have virtually focused on tracking in the daytime. However, when the night falls, the trackers will encounter more harsh scenes, which can easily lead to tracking failure. In this regard, this work proposes a novel tracker with anti-dark function (ADTrack). The proposed method integrates an efficient and effective low-light image enhancer into a CF-based tracker. Besides, a target-aware mask is simultaneously generated by virtue of image illumination variation. The target-aware mask can be applied to joint…
UniMergeTrack: Hierarchical Model Merging for General RGB-X Visual Object Tracking
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University（北京大学深圳研究生院电子与计算机工程学院）
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…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Siamese tracking paradigm has achieved great success, providing effective appearance discrimination and size estimation by the classification and regression. While such a paradigm typically optimizes the classification and regression independently, leading to task misalignment (accurate prediction boxes have no high target confidence scores). In this paper, to alleviate this misalignment, we propose a novel tracking paradigm, called SiamLA. Within this paradigm, a series of simple, yet effective localization-aware components are introduced, to generate localization-aware target confidence scor…
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…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Chung-Ang Univeristy（中央大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel on-line visual tracking framework based on the Siamese matching network and meta-learner network, which run at real-time speeds. Conventional deep convolutional feature-based discriminative visual tracking algorithms require continuous re-training of classifiers or correlation filters, which involve solving complex optimization tasks to adapt to the new appearance of a target object. To alleviate this complex process, our proposed algorithm incorporates and utilizes a meta-learner network to provide the matching network with new appearance information of the t…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Correlation Filters (CFs) have recently demonstrated excellent performance in terms of rapidly tracking objects under challenging photometric and geometric variations. The strength of the approach comes from its ability to efficiently learn - "on the fly" - how the object is changing over time. A fundamental drawback to CFs, however, is that the background of the object is not be modelled over time which can result in suboptimal results. In this paper we propose a Background-Aware CF that can model how both the foreground and background of the object varies over time. Our approach, like conven…
Sensetime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
In this paper, we propose a unified Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) framework learning to make full use of long term and short term cues for handling complex cases in MOT scenes. Besides, for better association, we propose switcher-aware classification (SAC), which takes the potential identity-switch causer (switcher) into consideration. Specifically, the proposed framework includes a Single Object Tracking (SOT) sub-net to capture short term cues, a re-identification (ReID) sub-net to extract long term cues and a switcher-aware classifier to make matching decisions using extracted features from t…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司）
We propose a new context-aware correlation filter based tracking framework to achieve both high computational speed and state-of-the-art performance among real-time trackers. The major contribution to the high computational speed lies in the proposed deep feature compression that is achieved by a context-aware scheme utilizing multiple expert auto-encoders; a context in our framework refers to the coarse category of the tracking target according to appearance patterns. In the pre-training phase, one expert auto-encoder is trained per category. In the tracking phase, the best expert auto-encode…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
With the development of depth sensors in recent years, RGBD object tracking has received significant attention. Compared with the traditional RGB object tracking, the addition of the depth modality can effectively solve the target and background interference. However, some existing RGBD trackers use the two modalities separately and thus some particularly useful shared information between them is ignored. On the other hand, some methods attempt to fuse the two modalities by treating them equally, resulting in the missing of modality-specific features. To tackle these limitations, we propose a …
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) systems track targets across cameras. Due to the continuity of target trajectories, tracking systems usually restrict their data association within a local neighborhood. In single camera tracking, local neighborhood refers to consecutive frames; in multi-camera tracking, it refers to neighboring cameras that the target may appear successively. For similarity estimation, tracking systems often adopt appearance features learned from the re-identification (re-ID) perspective. Different from tracking, re-ID usually does not have access to the trajectory c…
Recent progresses in model-free single object tracking (SOT) algorithms have largely inspired applying SOT to \emph{multi-object tracking} (MOT) to improve the robustness as well as relieving dependency on external detector. However, SOT algorithms are generally designed for distinguishing a target from its environment, and hence meet problems when a target is spatially mixed with similar objects as observed frequently in MOT. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an instance-aware tracker to integrate SOT techniques for MOT by encoding awareness both within and between target models…
