We introduce a novel backbone architecture to improve target-perception ability of feature representation for tracking. Specifically, having observed that de facto frameworks perform feature matching simply using the outputs from backbone for target localization, there is no direct feedback from the matching module to the backbone network, especially the shallow layers. More concretely, only the matching module can directly access the target information (in the reference frame), while the representation learning of candidate frame is blind to the reference target. As a consequence, the accumulation effect of target-irrelevant interference in the shallow stages may degrade the feature quality of deeper layers. In this paper, we approach the problem from a different angle by conducting multiple branch-wise interactions inside the Siamese-like backbone networks (InBN). At the core of InBN is a general interaction modeler (GIM) that injects the prior knowledge of reference image to different stages of the backbone network, leading to better target-perception and robust distractor-resistance of candidate feature representation with negligible computation cost. The proposed GIM module and InBN mechanism are general and applicable to different backbone types including CNN and Transformer for improvements, as evidenced by our extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks. In particular, the CNN version (based on SiamCAR) improves the baseline with 3.2/6.9 absolute gains of SUC on LaSOT/TNL2K, respectively. The Transformer version obtains SUC scores of 65.7/52.0 on LaSOT/TNL2K, which are on par with recent state of the arts. Code and models will be released.
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…
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 …
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…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
Multiple people tracking is a key problem for many applications such as surveillance, animation or car navigation, and a key input for tasks such as activity recognition. In crowded environments occlusions and false detections are common, and although there have been substantial advances in recent years, tracking is still a challenging task. Tracking is typically divided into two steps: detection, i.e., locating the pedestrians in the image, and data association, i.e., linking detections across frames to form complete trajectories. For the data association task, approaches typically aim at dev…
Tongji University（同济大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Correlation filter-based tracking has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with high efficiency. However, it has two imperfections, i.e., boundary effect and filter corruption. Several methods enlarging the search area can mitigate boundary effect, yet introducing undesired background distraction. Existing frame-by-frame context learning strategies for repressing background distraction nevertheless lower the tracking speed. Inspired by keyframe-based simultaneous localization and mapping, keyfilter is proposed in visual tracking for the first time, in order to handle the above …
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
While deep-learning based tracking methods have achieved substantial progress, they entail large-scale and high-quality annotated data for sufficient training. To eliminate expensive and exhaustive annotation, we study self-supervised learning for visual tracking. In this work, we develop the Crop-Transform-Paste operation, which is able to synthesize sufficient training data by simulating various appearance variations during tracking, including appearance variations of objects and background interference. Since the target state is known in all synthesized data, existing deep trackers can be t…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of California, Merced（加利福尼亚大学默塞德分校）；Google Cloud AI（谷歌云人工智能）
Existing deep trackers mainly use convolutional neural networks pre-trained for generic object recognition task for representations. Despite demonstrated successes for numerous vision tasks, the contributions of using pre-trained deep features for visual tracking are not as significant as that for object recognition. The key issue is that in visual tracking the targets of interest can be arbitrary object class with arbitrary forms. As such, pre-trained deep features are less effective in modeling these targets of arbitrary forms for distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we pr…
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on…
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School（哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究生院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Most thermal infrared (TIR) tracking methods are discriminative, treating the tracking problem as a classification task. However, the objective of the classifier (label prediction) is not coupled to the objective of the tracker (location estimation). The classification task focuses on the between-class difference of the arbitrary objects, while the tracking task mainly deals with the within-class difference of the same objects. In this paper, we cast the TIR tracking problem as a similarity verification task, which is coupled well to the objective of the tracking task. We propose a TIR tracker…
Visual object tracking is a fundamental task in the field of computer vision. Recently, Siamese trackers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on recent benchmarks. However, Siamese trackers do not fully utilize semantic and objectness information from pre-trained networks that have been trained on the image classification task. Furthermore, the pre-trained Siamese architecture is sparsely activated by the category label which leads to unnecessary calculations and overfitting. In this paper, we propose to learn a Domain-Aware, that is fully utilizing semantic and objectness information wh…
A New Dataset and a Distractor-Aware Architecture for Transparent Object Tracking
Faculty of computer and information science, University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学计算机与信息科学学院）；Center for Machine Perception, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学机器感知中心）
Transformer-based visual object tracking has been utilized extensively. However, the Transformer structure is lack of enough inductive bias. In addition, only focusing on encoding the global feature does harm to modeling local details, which restricts the capability of tracking in aerial robots. Specifically, with local-modeling to global-search mechanism, the proposed tracker replaces the global encoder by a novel local-recognition encoder. In the employed encoder, a local-recognition attention and a local element correction network are carefully designed for reducing the global redundant inf…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）
This paper aims to tackle Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), an important problem in computer vision but remains challenging due to many practical issues, especially occlusions. Indeed, we propose a new real-time Depth Perspective-aware Multiple Object Tracking (DP-MOT) approach to tackle the occlusion problem in MOT. A simple yet efficient Subject-Ordered Depth Estimation (SODE) is first proposed to automatically order the depth positions of detected subjects in a 2D scene in an unsupervised manner. Using the output from SODE, a new Active pseudo-3D Kalman filter, a simple but effective extensio…
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）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
Recently, Siamese networks have drawn great attention in visual tracking community because of their balanced accuracy and speed. However, features used in most Siamese tracking approaches can only discriminate foreground from the non-semantic backgrounds. The semantic backgrounds are always considered as distractors, which hinders the robustness of Siamese trackers. In this paper, we focus on learning distractor-aware Siamese networks for accurate and long-term tracking. To this end, features used in traditional Siamese trackers are analyzed at first. We observe that the imbalanced distributio…
Temple University（天普大学）；HiScene Information Technologies（嗨视信息科技）
Convolutional neural network (CNN) has drawn increasing interest in visual tracking owing to its powerfulness in feature extraction. Most existing CNN-based trackers treat tracking as a classification problem. However, these trackers are sensitive to similar distractors because their CNN models mainly focus on inter-class classification. To address this problem, we use self-structure information of object to distinguish it from distractors. Specifically, we utilize recurrent neural network (RNN) to model object structure, and incorporate it into CNN to improve its robustness to similar distrac…
An HMM-based framework for identity-aware long-term multi-object tracking from sparse and uncertain identification: use case on long-term tracking in livestock
Centre de développement du porc du Québec（魁北克猪发展中心）
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Baidu USA（百度美国）；SenseTime（商汤科技）
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a popular topic in computer vision. However, identity issue, i.e., an object is wrongly associated with another object of a different identity, still remains to be a challenging problem. To address it, switchers, i.e., confusing targets thatmay cause identity issues, should be focused. Based on this motivation,this paper proposes a novel switcher-aware framework for multi-object tracking, which consists of Spatial Conflict Graph model (SCG) and Switcher-Aware Association (SAA). The SCG eliminates spatial switch-ers within one frame by building a conflict graph an…
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…
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a crucial task in computer vision society. However, most tracking-by-detection MOT methods, with available detected bounding boxes, cannot effectively handle static, slow-moving and fast-moving camera scenarios simultaneously due to ego-motion and frequent occlusion. In this work, we propose a novel tracking framework, called "instance-aware MOT" (IA-MOT), that can track multiple objects in either static or moving cameras by jointly considering the instance-level features and object motions. First, robust appearance features are extracted from a variant of Mas…
PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯塞勒基金会）
How would you fairly evaluate two multi-object tracking algorithms (i.e. trackers), each one employing a different object detector? Detectors keep improving, thus trackers can make less effort to estimate object states over time. Is it then fair to compare a new tracker employing a new detector with another tracker using an old detector? In this paper, we propose a novel performance measure, named Tracking Effort Measure (TEM), to evaluate trackers that use different detectors. TEM estimates the improvement that the tracker does with respect to its input data (i.e. detections) at frame level (…
Correlation filter (CF) based trackers have aroused increasing attentions in visual tracking field due to the superior performance on several datasets while maintaining high running speed. For each frame, an ideal filter is trained in order to discriminate the target from its surrounding background. Considering that the target always undergoes external and internal interference during tracking procedure, the trained filter should take consideration of not only the external distractions but also the target appearance variation synchronously. To this end, we present a State-aware Anti-drift Trac…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Sony Group Corporation（索尼集团公司）
We propose a light-weight and highly efficient Joint Detection and Tracking pipeline for the task of Multi-Object Tracking using a fully-transformer architecture. It is a modified version of TransTrack, which overcomes the computational bottleneck associated with its design, and at the same time, achieves state-of-the-art MOTA score of 73.20%. The model design is driven by a transformer based backbone instead of CNN, which is highly scalable with the input resolution. We also propose a drop-in replacement for Feed Forward Network of transformer encoder layer, by using Butterfly Transform Opera…
Fujian Normal University（福建师范大学）；Fujian Newland Computer Co Ltd.（福建新大陆电脑有限公司）
To overcome the problem of occlusion in visual tracking, this paper proposes an occlusion-aware tracking algorithm. The proposed algorithm divides the object into discrete image patches according to the pixel distribution of the object by means of clustering. To avoid the drifting of the tracker to false targets, the proposed algorithm extracts the dominant features, such as color histogram or histogram of oriented gradient orientation, from these image patches, and uses them as cues for tracking. To enhance the robustness of the tracker, the proposed algorithm employs an implicit spatial stru…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；National Tsing Hua University（清华大学）
The paper presents a new method, SearchTrack, for multiple object tracking and segmentation (MOTS). To address the association problem between detected objects, SearchTrack proposes object-customized search and motion-aware features. By maintaining a Kalman filter for each object, we encode the predicted motion into the motion-aware feature, which includes both motion and appearance cues. For each object, a customized fully convolutional search engine is created by SearchTrack by learning a set of weights for dynamic convolutions specific to the object. Experiments demonstrate that our SearchT…
Visual object tracking performance has been dramatically improved in recent years, but some severe challenges remain open, like distractors and occlusions. We suspect the reason is that the feature representations of the tracking targets are only expressively learned but not fully discriminatively modeled. In this paper, we propose a novel Instance-Aware Tracker (IAT) to explicitly excavate the discriminability of feature representations, which improves the classical visual tracking pipeline with an instance-level classifier. First, we introduce a contrastive learning mechanism to formulate th…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Robustness and discrimination power are two fundamental requirements in visual object tracking. In most tracking paradigms, we find that the features extracted by the popular Siamese-like networks cannot fully discriminatively model the tracked targets and distractor objects, hindering them from simultaneously meeting these two requirements. While most methods focus on designing robust correlation operations, we propose a novel target-dependent feature network inspired by the self-/cross-attention scheme. In contrast to the Siamese-like feature extraction, our network deeply embeds cross-image…
Human action recognition in 3D skeleton sequences has attracted a lot of research attention. Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown promising performance in this task due to their strengths in modeling the dependencies and dynamics in sequential data. As not all skeletal joints are informative for action recognition, and the irrelevant joints often bring noise which can degrade the performance, we need to pay more attention to the informative ones. However, the original LSTM network does not have explicit attention ability. In this paper, we propose a new class of LSTM net…
TF-SASM: Training-free Spatial-aware Sparse Memory for Multi-object Tracking
John von Neumann Institute（约翰·冯·诺依曼研究所）；University of Science, VNU-HCM Viet Nam National University（越南国家大学胡志明市自然科学大学）；Faculty of Information Technology（信息技术学院）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Modern multi-object tracking (MOT) systems usually model the trajectories by associating per-frame detections. However, when camera motion, fast motion, and occlusion challenges occur, it is difficult to ensure long-range tracking or even the tracklet purity, especially for small objects. Although re-identification is often employed, due to noisy partial-detections, similar appearance, and lack of temporal-spatial constraints, it is not only unreliable and time-consuming, but still cannot address the false negatives for occluded and blurred objects. In this paper, we propose an enhanced MOT pa…
STATrack: A Target-Aware Fully Spiking Neural Network for Efficient UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）；School of Electronic Information, Central South University（中南大学电子信息学院）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；HiSilicon (Shanghai) Technologies Company Ltd.（海思（上海）科技有限公司）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we analyze the spatial information of deep features, and propose two complementary regressions for robust visual tracking. First, we propose a kernelized ridge regression model wherein the kernel value is defined as the weighted sum of similarity scores of all pairs of patches between two samples. We show that this model can be formulated as a neural network and thus can be efficiently solved. Second, we propose a fully convolutional neural network with spatially regularized kernels, through which the filter kernel corresponding to each output channel is forced to focus on a spe…
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Anhui University（安徽大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Tracking-by-detection is a very popular framework for single object tracking which attempts to search the target object within a local search window for each frame. Although such local search mechanism works well on simple videos, however, it makes the trackers sensitive to extremely challenging scenarios, such as heavy occlusion and fast motion. In this paper, we propose a novel and general target-aware attention mechanism (termed TANet) and integrate it with tracking-by-detection framework to conduct joint local and global search for robust tracking. Specifically, we extract the features of …
More powerful feature representations derived from deep neural networks benefit visual tracking algorithms widely. However, the lack of exploitation on temporal information prevents tracking algorithms from adapting to appearances changing or resisting to drift. This paper proposes a correlation filter based tracking method which aggregates historical features in a spatial-aligned and scale-aware paradigm. The features of historical frames are sampled and aggregated to search frame according to a pixel-level alignment module based on deformable convolutions. In addition, we also use a feature …
