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 the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 17 state-of-the-art tracking methods. We will release the dataset for free academic usage, dataset download link and code will be released soon.
Motion, as the most distinct phenomenon in a video to involve the changes over time, has been unique and critical to the development of video representation learning. In this paper, we ask the question: how important is the motion particularly for self-supervised video representation learning. To this end, we compose a duet of exploiting the motion for data augmentation and feature learning in the regime of contrastive learning. Specifically, we present a Motion-focused Contrastive Learning (MCL) method that regards such duet as the foundation. On one hand, MCL capitalizes on optical flow of each frame in a video to temporally and spatially sample the tubelets (i.e., sequences of associated frame patches across time) as data augmentations. On the other hand, MCL further aligns gradient maps of the convolutional layers to optical flow maps from spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal perspectives, in order to ground motion information in feature learning. Extensive experiments conducted on R(2+1)D backbone demonstrate the effectiveness of our MCL. On UCF101, the linear classifier trained on the representations learnt by MCL achieves 81.91% top-1 accuracy, outperforming ImageNet supervised pre-training by 6.78%. On Kinetics-400, MCL achieves 66.62% top-1 accuracy under the linear protocol. Code is available at //github.com/YihengZhang-CV/MCL-Motion-Focused-Contrastive-Learning.
Siamese-based trackers have achived promising performance on visual object tracking tasks. Most existing Siamese-based trackers contain two separate branches for tracking, including classification branch and bounding box regression branch. In addition, image segmentation provides an alternative way to obetain the more accurate target region. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker with two-stages: detection and segmentation. The detection stage is capable of locating the target by Siamese networks. Then more accurate tracking results are obtained by segmentation module given the coarse state estimation in the first stage. We conduct experiments on four benchmarks. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, with the EAO of 52.6$\%$ on VOT2016, 51.3$\%$ on VOT2018, and 39.0$\%$ on VOT2019 datasets, respectively.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems into consideration and are unsupervised. By leveraging returns, the most important feedback signals in RL, we propose a novel auxiliary task that forces the learnt representations to discriminate state-action pairs with different returns. Our auxiliary loss is theoretically justified to learn representations that capture the structure of a new form of state-action abstraction, under which state-action pairs with similar return distributions are aggregated together. In low data regime, our algorithm outperforms strong baselines on complex tasks in Atari games and DeepMind Control suite, and achieves even better performance when combined with existing auxiliary tasks.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Planar object tracking is an actively studied problem in vision-based robotic applications. While several benchmarks have been constructed for evaluating state-of-the-art algorithms, there is a lack of video sequences captured in the wild rather than in constrained laboratory environment. In this paper, we present a carefully designed planar object tracking benchmark containing 210 videos of 30 planar objects sampled in the natural environment. In particular, for each object, we shoot seven videos involving various challenging factors, namely scale change, rotation, perspective distortion, motion blur, occlusion, out-of-view, and unconstrained. The ground truth is carefully annotated semi-manually to ensure the quality. Moreover, eleven state-of-the-art algorithms are evaluated on the benchmark using two evaluation metrics, with detailed analysis provided for the evaluation results. We expect the proposed benchmark to benefit future studies on planar object tracking.
Despite the numerous developments in object tracking, further development of current tracking algorithms is limited by small and mostly saturated datasets. As a matter of fact, data-hungry trackers based on deep-learning currently rely on object detection datasets due to the scarcity of dedicated large-scale tracking datasets. In this work, we present TrackingNet, the first large-scale dataset and benchmark for object tracking in the wild. We provide more than 30K videos with more than 14 million dense bounding box annotations. Our dataset covers a wide selection of object classes in broad and diverse context. By releasing such a large-scale dataset, we expect deep trackers to further improve and generalize. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark composed of 500 novel videos, modeled with a distribution similar to our training dataset. By sequestering the annotation of the test set and providing an online evaluation server, we provide a fair benchmark for future development of object trackers. Deep trackers fine-tuned on a fraction of our dataset improve their performance by up to 1.6% on OTB100 and up to 1.7% on TrackingNet Test. We provide an extensive benchmark on TrackingNet by evaluating more than 20 trackers. Our results suggest that object tracking in the wild is far from being solved.
In this paper, we propose a new long video dataset (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and benchmark for visual object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 videos from real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect realistic real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long sequences and (b) the accuracy of most trackers abruptly drops on challenging long sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction of long term tracking.
Template-matching methods for visual tracking have gained popularity recently due to their comparable performance and fast speed. However, they lack effective ways to adapt to changes in the target object's appearance, making their tracking accuracy still far from state-of-the-art. In this paper, we propose a dynamic memory network to adapt the template to the target's appearance variations during tracking. An LSTM is used as a memory controller, where the input is the search feature map and the outputs are the control signals for the reading and writing process of the memory block. As the location of the target is at first unknown in the search feature map, an attention mechanism is applied to concentrate the LSTM input on the potential target. To prevent aggressive model adaptivity, we apply gated residual template learning to control the amount of retrieved memory that is used to combine with the initial template. Unlike tracking-by-detection methods where the object's information is maintained by the weight parameters of neural networks, which requires expensive online fine-tuning to be adaptable, our tracker runs completely feed-forward and adapts to the target's appearance changes by updating the external memory. Moreover, the capacity of our model is not determined by the network size as with other trackers -- the capacity can be easily enlarged as the memory requirements of a task increase, which is favorable for memorizing long-term object information. Extensive experiments on OTB and VOT demonstrates that our tracker MemTrack performs favorably against state-of-the-art tracking methods while retaining real-time speed of 50 fps.
During the recent years, correlation filters have shown dominant and spectacular results for visual object tracking. The types of the features that are employed in these family of trackers significantly affect the performance of visual tracking. The ultimate goal is to utilize robust features invariant to any kind of appearance change of the object, while predicting the object location as properly as in the case of no appearance change. As the deep learning based methods have emerged, the study of learning features for specific tasks has accelerated. For instance, discriminative visual tracking methods based on deep architectures have been studied with promising performance. Nevertheless, correlation filter based (CFB) trackers confine themselves to use the pre-trained networks which are trained for object classification problem. To this end, in this manuscript the problem of learning deep fully convolutional features for the CFB visual tracking is formulated. In order to learn the proposed model, a novel and efficient backpropagation algorithm is presented based on the loss function of the network. The proposed learning framework enables the network model to be flexible for a custom design. Moreover, it alleviates the dependency on the network trained for classification. Extensive performance analysis shows the efficacy of the proposed custom design in the CFB tracking framework. By fine-tuning the convolutional parts of a state-of-the-art network and integrating this model to a CFB tracker, which is the top performing one of VOT2016, 18% increase is achieved in terms of expected average overlap, and tracking failures are decreased by 25%, while maintaining the superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 tracking datasets.