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, different from traditional Siamese trackers, which only obtain one search image during the process of picking up template-search image pairs, an extra search sample adjacent to the original one is selected to predict the temporal transformation, resulting in improved robustness of tracking performance.As for multi-modal tracking, constrained to the limited RGBT datasets, the adaptive fusion sub-network is appended to our method at the decision level to reflect the complementary characteristics contained in two modalities. To design a thermal infrared assisted RGB tracker, the outputs of the classification head from the TIR modality are taken into consideration before the residual connection from the RGB modality. Extensive experimental results on three challenging datasets, i.e. VOT-RGBT2019, GTOT and RGBT210, verify the effectiveness of our method. Code will be shared at \textcolor{blue}{\emph{https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/TAAT}}.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Visual object tracking, as a fundamental task in computer vision, has drawn much attention in recent years. To extend trackers to a wider range of applications, researchers have introduced information from multiple modalities to handle specific scenes, which is a promising research prospect with emerging methods and benchmarks. To provide a thorough review of multi-modal track-ing, we summarize the multi-modal tracking algorithms, especially visible-depth (RGB-D) tracking and visible-thermal (RGB-T) tracking in a unified taxonomy from different aspects. Second, we provide a detailed descriptio…
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…
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）
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）
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…
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）
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…
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）
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）
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 severa…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Verona（维罗纳大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；Shenzhen Academy of Aerospace Technology（深圳航天科技创新研究院）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Small object tracking becomes an increasingly important task, which however has been largely unexplored in computer vision. The great challenges stem from the facts that: 1) small objects show extreme vague and variable appearances, and 2) they tend to be lost easier as compared to normal-sized ones due to the shaking of lens. In this paper, we propose a novel aggregation signature suitable for small object tracking, especially aiming for the challenge of sudden and large drift. We make three-fold contributions in this work. First, technically, we propose a new descriptor, named aggregation si…
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）
Autonomous systems need to localize and track surrounding objects in 3D space for safe motion planning. As a result, 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a vital role in autonomous navigation. Most MOT methods use a tracking-by-detection pipeline, which includes object detection and data association processing. However, many approaches detect objects in 2D RGB sequences for tracking, which is lack of reliability when localizing objects in 3D space. Furthermore, it is still challenging to learn discriminative features for temporally-consistent detection in different frames, and the affinity mat…
For visual object tracking, it is difficult to realize an almighty online tracker due to the huge variations of target appearance depending on an image sequence. This paper proposes an online tracking method that adaptively aggregates arbitrary multiple online trackers. The performance of the proposed method is theoretically guaranteed to be comparable to that of the best tracker for any image sequence, although the best expert is unknown during tracking. The experimental study on the large variations of benchmark datasets and aggregated trackers demonstrates that the proposed method can achie…
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…
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）
CGTrack: Cascade Gating Network with Hierarchical Feature Aggregation for UAV Tracking
Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（杭州高等研究院，中国科学院大学）；Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas（计算机科学与工程系，北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院软件研究所）
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 …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）
Modern online multiple object tracking (MOT) methods usually focus on two directions to improve tracking performance. One is to predict new positions in an incoming frame based on tracking information from previous frames, and the other is to enhance data association by generating more discriminative identity embeddings. Some works combined both directions within one framework but handled them as two individual tasks, thus gaining little mutual benefits. In this paper, we propose a novel unified model with synergy between position prediction and embedding association. The two tasks are linked …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）
Transformer framework has been showing superior performances in visual object tracking for its great strength in information aggregation across the template and search image with the well-known attention mechanism. Most recent advances focus on exploring attention mechanism variants for better information aggregation. We find these schemes are equivalent to or even just a subset of the basic self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we prove that the vanilla self-attention structure is sufficient for information aggregation, and structural adaption is unnecessary. The key is not the attention s…
UASTrack: A Unified Adaptive Selection Framework with Modality-Customization in Single Object Tracking
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（萨里大学视觉、语音和信号处理中心）
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（合作 medianet 创新中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；CloudWalk Technology Co., Ltd（云从科技股份有限公司）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Boston University（波士顿大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
We propose a novel Siamese Natural Language Tracker (SNLT), which brings the advancements in visual tracking to the tracking by natural language (NL) descriptions task. The proposed SNLT is applicable to a wide range of Siamese trackers, providing a new class of baselines for the tracking by NL task and promising future improvements from the advancements of Siamese trackers. The carefully designed architecture of the Siamese Natural Language Region Proposal Network (SNL-RPN), together with the Dynamic Aggregation of vision and language modalities, is introduced to perform the tracking by NL ta…
Huazhong Univerisity of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Discriminative representation is essential to keep a unique identifier for each target in Multiple object tracking (MOT). Some recent MOT methods extract features of the bounding box region or the center point as identity embeddings. However, when targets are occluded, these coarse-grained global representations become unreliable. To this end, we propose exploring diverse fine-grained representation, which describes appearance comprehensively from global and local perspectives. This fine-grained representation requires high feature resolution and precise semantic information. To effectively al…
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…
While remarkable progress has been made in robust visual tracking, accurate target state estimation still remains a highly challenging problem. In this paper, we argue that this issue is closely related to the prevalent bounding box representation, which provides only a coarse spatial extent of object. Thus an effcient visual tracking framework is proposed to accurately estimate the target state with a finer representation as a set of representative points. The point set is trained to indicate the semantically and geometrically significant positions of target region, enabling more fine-grained…
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is an important task in computer vision. MOT is still challenging due to the occlusion problem, especially in dense scenes. Following the tracking-by-detection framework, we propose the Box-Plane Matching (BPM) method to improve the MOT performacne in dense scenes. First, we design the Layer-wise Aggregation Discriminative Model (LADM) to filter the noisy detections. Then, to associate remaining detections correctly, we introduce the Global Attention Feature Model (GAFM) to extract appearance feature and use it to calculate the appearance similarity between histo…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex AI研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Transformer trackers have achieved impressive advancements recently, where the attention mechanism plays an important role. However, the independent correlation computation in the attention mechanism could result in noisy and ambiguous attention weights, which inhibits further performance improvement. To address this issue, we propose an attention in attention (AiA) module, which enhances appropriate correlations and suppresses erroneous ones by seeking consensus among all correlation vectors. Our AiA module can be readily applied to both self-attention blocks and cross-attention blocks to fac…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；Anhui University（安徽大学）；DarkMatter AI Research（DarkMatter AI 研究院）
Crowd counting is a fundamental yet challenging task, which desires rich information to generate pixel-wise crowd density maps. However, most previous methods only used the limited information of RGB images and cannot well discover potential pedestrians in unconstrained scenarios. In this work, we find that incorporating optical and thermal information can greatly help to recognize pedestrians. To promote future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale RGBT Crowd Counting (RGBT-CC) benchmark, which contains 2,030 pairs of RGB-thermal images with 138,389 annotated people. Furthermor…
Siamese network based trackers formulate tracking as convolutional feature cross-correlation between target template and searching region. However, Siamese trackers still have accuracy gap compared with state-of-the-art algorithms and they cannot take advantage of feature from deep networks, such as ResNet-50 or deeper. In this work we prove the core reason comes from the lack of strict translation invariance. By comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validations, we break this restriction through a simple yet effective spatial aware sampling strategy and successfully train a ResN…
CowCare: A Unified Visual Framework for Viewpoint-Robust Cattle Tracking and Spatiotemporal Heat-Stress Analysis
College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University（中国农业大学信息与电气工程学院）；National Innovation Center for Digital Fishery, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs（农业农村部国家数字渔业创新中心）；Key Laboratory of Smart Farming Technologies for Aquatic Animal and Livestock, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs（农业农村部水产动物与畜禽智慧养殖技术重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Agricultural Informatization Standardization, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs（农业农村部农业信息化标准化重点实验室）
A Two-Stage Detection-Tracking Framework for Stable Apple Quality Inspection in Dense Conveyor-Belt Environments
Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能交叉学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Department of Biological Environmental Science, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（生命科学与生物技术学院生物环境科学系，东国大学）；Department of Food Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（食品科学与生物技术系，东国大学）
