Event cameras are ideal for object tracking applications due to their ability to capture fast-moving objects while mitigating latency and data redundancy. Existing event-based clustering and feature tracking approaches for surveillance and object detection work well in the majority of cases, but fall short in a maritime environment. Our application of maritime vessel detection and tracking requires a process that can identify features and output a confidence score representing the likelihood that the feature was produced by a vessel, which may trigger a subsequent alert or activate a classification system. However, the maritime environment presents unique challenges such as the tendency of waves to produce the majority of events, demanding the majority of computational processing and producing false positive detections. By filtering redundant events and analyzing the movement of each event cluster, we can identify and track vessels while ignoring shorter lived and erratic features such as those produced by waves.
Appearance-based gaze estimation aims to predict the 3D eye gaze direction from a single image. While recent deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated excellent performance, they usually assume one calibrated face in each input image and cannot output multi-person gaze in real time. However, simultaneous gaze estimation for multiple people in the wild is necessary for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose the first one-stage end-to-end gaze estimation method, GazeOnce, which is capable of simultaneously predicting gaze directions for multiple faces (>10) in an image. In addition, we design a sophisticated data generation pipeline and propose a new dataset, MPSGaze, which contains full images of multiple people with 3D gaze ground truth. Experimental results demonstrate that our unified framework not only offers a faster speed, but also provides a lower gaze estimation error compared with state-of-the-art methods. This technique can be useful in real-time applications with multiple users.
Accurately detecting and tracking multi-objects is important for safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation. However, it remains challenging to provide guarantees on the performance of state-of-the-art techniques based on deep learning. We consider a strategy known as conformal prediction, which predicts sets of labels instead of a single label; in the classification and regression settings, these algorithms can guarantee that the true label lies within the prediction set with high probability. Building on these ideas, we propose multi-object detection and tracking algorithms that come with probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantees. They do so by constructing both a prediction set around each object detection as well as around the set of edge transitions; given an object, the detection prediction set contains its true bounding box with high probability, and the edge prediction set contains its true transition across frames with high probability. We empirically demonstrate that our method can detect and track objects with PAC guarantees on the COCO and MOT-17 datasets.
Multi-camera vehicle tracking is one of the most complicated tasks in Computer Vision as it involves distinct tasks including Vehicle Detection, Tracking, and Re-identification. Despite the challenges, multi-camera vehicle tracking has immense potential in transportation applications including speed, volume, origin-destination (O-D), and routing data generation. Several recent works have addressed the multi-camera tracking problem. However, most of the effort has gone towards improving accuracy on high-quality benchmark datasets while disregarding lower camera resolutions, compression artifacts and the overwhelming amount of computational power and time needed to carry out this task on its edge and thus making it prohibitive for large-scale and real-time deployment. Therefore, in this work we shed light on practical issues that should be addressed for the design of a multi-camera tracking system to provide actionable and timely insights. Moreover, we propose a real-time city-scale multi-camera vehicle tracking system that compares favorably to computationally intensive alternatives and handles real-world, low-resolution CCTV instead of idealized and curated video streams. To show its effectiveness, in addition to integration into the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS), we participated in the 2021 NVIDIA AI City multi-camera tracking challenge and our method is ranked among the top five performers on the public leaderboard.
Object detection and tracking in videos represent essential and computationally demanding building blocks for current and future visual perception systems. In order to reduce the efficiency gap between available methods and computational requirements of real-world applications, we propose to re-think one of the most successful methods for image object detection, Faster R-CNN, and extend it to the video domain. Specifically, we extend the detection framework to learn instance-level embeddings which prove beneficial for data association and re-identification purposes. Focusing on the computational aspects of detection and tracking, our proposed method reaches a very high computational efficiency necessary for relevant applications, while still managing to compete with recent and state-of-the-art methods as shown in the experiments we conduct on standard object tracking benchmarks
Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, which is inefficient and time-consuming during postprocessing. In this paper, we propose a Global Association Network (GANet) to formulate the lane detection problem from a new perspective, where each keypoint is directly regressed to the starting point of the lane line instead of point-by-point extension. Concretely, the association of keypoints to their belonged lane line is conducted by predicting their offsets to the corresponding starting points of lanes globally without dependence on each other, which could be done in parallel to greatly improve efficiency. In addition, we further propose a Lane-aware Feature Aggregator (LFA), which adaptively captures the local correlations between adjacent keypoints to supplement local information to the global association. Extensive experiments on two popular lane detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms previous methods with F1 score of 79.63% on CULane and 97.71% on Tusimple dataset with high FPS. The code will be released at //github.com/Wolfwjs/GANet.
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely-used technology to inherit information from cumbersome teacher models to compact student models, consequently realizing model compression and acceleration. Compared with image classification, object detection is a more complex task, and designing specific KD methods for object detection is non-trivial. In this work, we elaborately study the behaviour difference between the teacher and student detection models, and obtain two intriguing observations: First, the teacher and student rank their detected candidate boxes quite differently, which results in their precision discrepancy. Second, there is a considerable gap between the feature response differences and prediction differences between teacher and student, indicating that equally imitating all the feature maps of the teacher is the sub-optimal choice for improving the student's accuracy. Based on the two observations, we propose Rank Mimicking (RM) and Prediction-guided Feature Imitation (PFI) for distilling one-stage detectors, respectively. RM takes the rank of candidate boxes from teachers as a new form of knowledge to distill, which consistently outperforms the traditional soft label distillation. PFI attempts to correlate feature differences with prediction differences, making feature imitation directly help to improve the student's accuracy. On MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks, extensive experiments are conducted on various detectors with different backbones to validate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet50 achieves 40.4% mAP in MS COCO, which is 3.5% higher than its baseline, and also outperforms previous KD methods.
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.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Event detection (ED), a sub-task of event extraction, involves identifying triggers and categorizing event mentions. Existing methods primarily rely upon supervised learning and require large-scale labeled event datasets which are unfortunately not readily available in many real-life applications. In this paper, we consider and reformulate the ED task with limited labeled data as a Few-Shot Learning problem. We propose a Dynamic-Memory-Based Prototypical Network (DMB-PN), which exploits Dynamic Memory Network (DMN) to not only learn better prototypes for event types, but also produce more robust sentence encodings for event mentions. Differing from vanilla prototypical networks simply computing event prototypes by averaging, which only consume event mentions once, our model is more robust and is capable of distilling contextual information from event mentions for multiple times due to the multi-hop mechanism of DMNs. The experiments show that DMB-PN not only deals with sample scarcity better than a series of baseline models but also performs more robustly when the variety of event types is relatively large and the instance quantity is extremely small.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).