We propose ProTracker, a novel framework for accurate and robust long-term dense tracking of arbitrary points in videos. Previous methods relying on global cost volumes effectively handle large occlusions and scene changes but lack precision and temporal awareness. In contrast, local iteration-based methods accurately track smoothly transforming scenes but face challenges with occlusions and drift. To address these issues, we propose a probabilistic framework that marries the strengths of both paradigms by leveraging local optical flow for predictions and refined global heatmaps for observations. This design effectively combines global semantic information with temporally aware low-level features, enabling precise and robust long-term tracking of arbitrary points in videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProTracker attains state-of-the-art performance among optimization-based approaches and surpasses supervised feed-forward methods on multiple benchmarks. The code and model will be released after publication.
We present a data association method for vision-based multiple pedestrian tracking, using deep convolutional features to distinguish between different people based on their appearances. These re-identification (re-ID) features are learned such that they are invariant to transformations such as rotation, translation, and changes in the background, allowing consistent identification of a pedestrian moving through a scene. We incorporate re-ID features into a general data association likelihood model for multiple person tracking, experimentally validate this model by using it to perform tracking …
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；CVLab-EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）
Despite the recent advances in multiple object tracking (MOT), achieved by joint detection and tracking, dealing with long occlusions remains a challenge. This is due to the fact that such techniques tend to ignore the long-term motion information. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic autoregressive motion model to score tracklet proposals by directly measuring their likelihood. This is achieved by training our model to learn the underlying distribution of natural tracklets. As such, our model allows us not only to assign new detections to existing tracklets, but also to inpaint a track…
PKF: Probabilistic Data Association Kalman Filter for Multi-Object Tracking
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego（电气与计算机工程系，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania（电气与系统工程系，宾夕法尼亚大学）
Visual tracking is fundamentally the problem of regressing the state of the target in each video frame. While significant progress has been achieved, trackers are still prone to failures and inaccuracies. It is therefore crucial to represent the uncertainty in the target estimation. Although current prominent paradigms rely on estimating a state-dependent confidence score, this value lacks a clear probabilistic interpretation, complicating its use. In this work, we therefore propose a probabilistic regression formulation and apply it to tracking. Our network predicts the conditional probabilit…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
In many applications of computer vision it is important to accurately estimate the trajectory of an object over time by fusing data from a number of sources, of which 2D and 3D imagery is only one. In this paper, we show how to use a deep feature encoding in conjunction with generative densities over the features in a factor-graph based, probabilistic tracking framework. We present a likelihood model that combines a learned feature encoder with generative densities over them, both trained in a supervised manner. We also experiment with directly inferring probability through the use of image cl…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Multi-object tracking is an important ability for an autonomous vehicle to safely navigate a traffic scene. Current state-of-the-art follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm where existing tracks are associated with detected objects through some distance metric. The key challenges to increase tracking accuracy lie in data association and track life cycle management. We propose a probabilistic, multi-modal, multi-object tracking system consisting of different trainable modules to provide robust and data-driven tracking results. First, we learn how to fuse features from 2D images and 3D LiDAR …
3D multi-object tracking is a key module in autonomous driving applications that provides a reliable dynamic representation of the world to the planning module. In this paper, we present our on-line tracking method, which made the first place in the NuScenes Tracking Challenge, held at the AI Driving Olympics Workshop at NeurIPS 2019. Our method estimates the object states by adopting a Kalman Filter. We initialize the state covariance as well as the process and observation noise covariance with statistics from the training set. We also use the stochastic information from the Kalman Filter in …
Dense image alignment from RGB-D images remains a critical issue for real-world applications, especially under challenging lighting conditions and in a wide baseline setting. In this paper, we propose a new framework to learn a pixel-wise deep feature map and a deep feature-metric uncertainty map predicted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which together formulate a deep probabilistic feature-metric residual of the two-view constraint that can be minimised using Gauss-Newton in a coarse-to-fine optimisation framework. Furthermore, our network predicts a deep initial pose for faster and …
It is an effective strategy for the multi-person pose tracking task in videos to employ prediction and pose matching in a frame-by-frame manner. For this type of approach, uncertainty-aware modeling is essential because precise prediction is impossible. However, previous studies have relied on only a single prediction without incorporating uncertainty, which can cause critical tracking errors if the prediction is unreliable. This paper proposes an extension to this approach with Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). This naturally reformulates the tracking scheme to handle multiple predictions (or hyp…
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
This paper studies the interplay between kinematics (position and velocity) and appearance cues for establishing correspondences in multi-target pedestrian tracking. We investigate tracking-by-detection approaches based on a deep learning detector, joint integrated probabilistic data association (JIPDA), and appearance-based tracking of deep correspondence embeddings. We first addressed the fixed-camera setup by fine-tuning a convolutional detector for accurate pedestrian detection and combining it with kinematic-only JIPDA. The resulting submission ranked first on the 3DMOT2015 benchmark. How…
Urban Traffic Surveillance (UTS) is a surveillance system based on a monocular and calibrated video camera that detects vehicles in an urban traffic scenario with dense traffic on multiple lanes and vehicles performing sharp turning maneuvers. UTS then tracks the vehicles using a 3D bounding box representation and a physically reasonable 3D motion model relying on an unscented Kalman filter based approach. Since UTS recovers positions, shape and motion information in a three-dimensional world coordinate system, it can be employed to recognize diverse traffic violations or to supply intelligent…
Active learning methods, like uncertainty sampling, combined with probabilistic prediction techniques have achieved success in various problems like image classification and text classification. For more complex multivariate prediction tasks, the relationships between labels play an important role in designing structured classifiers with better performance. However, computational time complexity limits prevalent probabilistic methods from effectively supporting active learning. Specifically, while non-probabilistic methods based on structured support vector machines can be tractably applied to…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC（伊拉斯谟医学中心）
Segmenting tree structures is common in several image processing applications. In medical image analysis, reliable segmentations of airways, vessels, neurons and other tree structures can enable important clinical applications. We present a framework for tracking tree structures comprising of elongated branches using probabilistic state-space models and Bayesian smoothing. Unlike most existing methods that proceed with sequential tracking of branches, we present an exploratory method, that is less sensitive to local anomalies in the data due to acquisition noise and/or interfering structures. …
Accurately tracking and predicting behaviors of surrounding objects are key prerequisites for intelligent systems such as autonomous vehicles to achieve safe and high-quality decision making and motion planning. However, there still remain challenges for multi-target tracking due to object number fluctuation and occlusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose a constrained mixture sequential Monte Carlo (CMSMC) method in which a mixture representation is incorporated in the estimated posterior distribution to maintain multi-modality. Multiple targets can be tracked simultaneously within a …
NICTA；University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Background subtraction is a fundamental low-level processing task in numerous computer vision applications. The vast majority of algorithms process images on a pixel-by-pixel basis, where an independent decision is made for each pixel. A general limitation of such processing is that rich contextual information is not taken into account. We propose a block-based method capable of dealing with noise, illumination variations and dynamic backgrounds, while still obtaining smooth contours of foreground objects. Specifically, image sequences are analysed on an overlapping block-by-block basis. A low…
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…
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Object tracking is one of the fundamental problems in visual recognition tasks and has achieved significant improvements in recent years. The achievements often come with the price of enormous hardware consumption and expensive labor effort for consecutive labeling. A missing ingredient for robust tracking is achieving performance with minimal modification on network structure and semi-supervised learning intermittent labeled frames. In this paper, we ad-dress these problems in a Bayesian tracking and detection framework parameterized by neural network outputs. In our framework, the tracking a…
Computer Vision Center (CVC)（计算机视觉中心 (CVC)）；Universitat de Barcelona (UB)（巴塞罗那大学 (UB)）；Paris Descartes University (Paris V)（巴黎第五大学 (巴黎笛卡尔大学)）
This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for the detection and the tracking of particles in fluorescent time-lapse imaging. In the presence of a very noised and poor-quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a contrario model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads to algorithms that neither require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious parameter tuning and are very robust …
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
The majority of approaches for acquiring dense 3D environment maps with RGB-D cameras assumes static environments or rejects moving objects as outliers. The representation and tracking of moving objects, however, has significant potential for applications in robotics or augmented reality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to dynamic SLAM with dense object-level representations. We represent rigid objects in local volumetric signed distance function (SDF) maps, and formulate multi-object tracking as direct alignment of RGB-D images with the SDF representations. Our main novelty is a pr…
Robotics, Perception and Learning Lab Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)（皇家理工学院（KTH）机器人、感知与学习实验室）
This paper studies the problem of detection and tracking of general objects with long-term dynamics, observed by a mobile robot moving in a large environment. A key problem is that due to the environment scale, it can only observe a subset of the objects at any given time. Since some time passes between observations of objects in different places, the objects might be moved when the robot is not there. We propose a model for this movement in which the objects typically only move locally, but with some small probability they jump longer distances, through what we call global motion. For filteri…
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Télécom ParisTech（巴黎电信学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for exploiting structural relations to track multiple objects that may undergo long-term occlusion and abrupt motion. We use a model-free approach that relies only on annotations given in the first frame of the video to track all the objects online, i.e. without knowledge from future frames. We initialize a probabilistic Attributed Relational Graph (ARG) from the first frame, which is incrementally updated along the video. Instead of using the structural information only to evaluate the scene, the proposed approach considers it to generate new trackin…
Suture needle localization is necessary for autonomous suturing. Previous approaches in autonomous suturing often relied on fiducial markers rather than markerless detection schemes for localizing a suture needle due to the inconsistency of markerless detections. However, fiducial markers are not practical for real-world applications and can often be occluded from environmental factors in surgery (e.g., blood). Therefore in this work, we present a robust tracking approach for estimating the 6D pose of a suture needle when using inconsistent detections. We define observation models based on sut…
