Computer vision technologies are very attractive for practical applications running on embedded systems. For such an application, it is desirable for the deployed algorithms to run in high-speed and require no offline training. To develop a single-target tracking algorithm with these properties, we propose an ensemble of the kernelized correlation filters (KCF), we call it EnKCF. A committee of KCFs is specifically designed to address the variations in scale and translation of moving objects. To guarantee a high-speed run-time performance, we deploy each of KCFs in turn, instead of applying multiple KCFs to each frame. To minimize any potential drifts between individual KCFs transition, we developed a particle filter. Experimental results showed that the performance of ours is, on average, 70.10% for precision at 20 pixels, 53.00% for success rate for the OTB100 data, and 54.50% and 40.2% for the UAV123 data. Experimental results showed that our method is better than other high-speed trackers over 5% on precision on 20 pixels and 10-20% on AUC on average. Moreover, our implementation ran at 340 fps for the OTB100 and at 416 fps for the UAV123 dataset that is faster than DCF (292 fps) for the OTB100 and KCF (292 fps) for the UAV123. To increase flexibility of the proposed EnKCF running on various platforms, we also explored different levels of deep convolutional features.
Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for object detection that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance, with a 60x training speedup. Our pipeline combines (i) the Region Proposal Network and the deep feature extractor from [22] to efficiently select candidate RoIs and encode them into powerful representations, with (ii) the FALKON [23] algorithm, a novel kernel-based method that allows fast training on large scale problems (millions of points). We address the size and imbalance of training data by exploiting the stochastic subsampling intrinsic into the method and a novel, fast, bootstrapping approach. We assess the effectiveness of the approach on a standard Computer Vision dataset (PASCAL VOC 2007 [5]) and demonstrate its applicability to a real robotic scenario with the iCubWorld Transformations [18] dataset.
Compared with visible object tracking, thermal infrared (TIR) object tracking can track an arbitrary target in total darkness since it cannot be influenced by illumination variations. However, there are many unwanted attributes that constrain the potentials of TIR tracking, such as the absence of visual color patterns and low resolutions. Recently, structured output support vector machine (SOSVM) and discriminative correlation filter (DCF) have been successfully applied to visible object tracking, respectively. Motivated by these, in this paper, we propose a large margin structured convolution operator (LMSCO) to achieve efficient TIR object tracking. To improve the tracking performance, we employ the spatial regularization and implicit interpolation to obtain continuous deep feature maps, including deep appearance features and deep motion features, of the TIR targets. Finally, a collaborative optimization strategy is exploited to significantly update the operators. Our approach not only inherits the advantage of the strong discriminative capability of SOSVM but also achieves accurate and robust tracking with higher-dimensional features and more dense samples. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate the advantages of DCF and SOSVM for TIR object tracking. Comprehensive evaluations on two thermal infrared tracking benchmarks, i.e. VOT-TIR2015 and VOT-TIR2016, clearly demonstrate that our LMSCO tracker achieves impressive results and outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers in terms of accuracy and robustness with sufficient frame rate.
We propose an algorithm for real-time 6DOF pose tracking of rigid 3D objects using a monocular RGB camera. The key idea is to derive a region-based cost function using temporally consistent local color histograms. While such region-based cost functions are commonly optimized using first-order gradient descent techniques, we systematically derive a Gauss-Newton optimization scheme which gives rise to drastically faster convergence and highly accurate and robust tracking performance. We furthermore propose a novel complex dataset dedicated for the task of monocular object pose tracking and make it publicly available to the community. To our knowledge, It is the first to address the common and important scenario in which both the camera as well as the objects are moving simultaneously in cluttered scenes. In numerous experiments - including our own proposed data set - we demonstrate that the proposed Gauss-Newton approach outperforms existing approaches, in particular in the presence of cluttered backgrounds, heterogeneous objects and partial occlusions.
In this paper, a novel image moments based model for shape estimation and tracking of an object moving with a complex trajectory is presented. The camera is assumed to be stationary looking at a moving object. Point features inside the object are sampled as measurements. An ellipsoidal approximation of the shape is assumed as a primitive shape. The shape of an ellipse is estimated using a combination of image moments. Dynamic model of image moments when the object moves under the constant velocity or coordinated turn motion model is derived as a function for the shape estimation of the object. An Unscented Kalman Filter-Interacting Multiple Model (UKF-IMM) filter algorithm is applied to estimate the shape of the object (approximated as an ellipse) and track its position and velocity. A likelihood function based on average log-likelihood is derived for the IMM filter. Simulation results of the proposed UKF-IMM algorithm with the image moments based models are presented that show the estimations of the shape of the object moving in complex trajectories. Comparison results, using intersection over union (IOU), and position and velocity root mean square errors (RMSE) as metrics, with a benchmark algorithm from literature are presented. Results on real image data captured from the quadcopter are also presented.
Object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo drastic appearance changes over time. Recently, adaptive correlation filters have been successfully applied to object tracking. However, tracking algorithms relying on highly adaptive correlation filters are prone to drift due to noisy updates. Moreover, as these algorithms do not maintain long-term memory of target appearance, they cannot recover from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or target disappearance in the camera view. In this paper, we propose to learn multiple adaptive correlation filters with both long-term and short-term memory of target appearance for robust object tracking. First, we learn a kernelized correlation filter with an aggressive learning rate for locating target objects precisely. We take into account the appropriate size of surrounding context and the feature representations. Second, we learn a correlation filter over a feature pyramid centered at the estimated target position for predicting scale changes. Third, we learn a complementary correlation filter with a conservative learning rate to maintain long-term memory of target appearance. We use the output responses of this long-term filter to determine if tracking failure occurs. In the case of tracking failures, we apply an incrementally learned detector to recover the target position in a sliding window fashion. Extensive experimental results on large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.
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.
Depth information provides a strong cue for occlusion detection and handling, but has been largely omitted in generic object tracking until recently due to lack of suitable benchmark datasets and applications. In this work, we propose a Depth Masked Discriminative Correlation Filter (DM-DCF) which adopts novel depth segmentation based occlusion detection that stops correlation filter updating and depth masking which adaptively adjusts the spatial support for correlation filter. In Princeton RGBD Tracking Benchmark, our DM-DCF is among the state-of-the-art in overall ranking and the winner on multiple categories. Moreover, since it is based on DCF, ``DM-DCF`` runs an order of magnitude faster than its competitors making it suitable for time constrained applications.
Object tracking is one of the most challenging task and has secured significant attention of computer vision researchers in the past two decades. Recent deep learning based trackers have shown good performance on various tracking challenges. A tracking method should track objects in sequential frames accurately in challenges such as deformation, low resolution, occlusion, scale and light variations. Most trackers achieve good performance on specific challenges instead of all tracking problems, hence there is a lack of general purpose tracking algorithms that can perform well in all conditions. Moreover, performance of tracking techniques has not been evaluated in noisy environments. Visual object tracking has real world applications and there is good chance that noise may get added during image acquisition in surveillance cameras. We aim to study the robustness of two state of the art trackers in the presence of noise including Efficient Convolutional Operators (ECO) and Correlation Filter Network (CFNet). Our study demonstrates that the performance of these trackers degrades as the noise level increases, which demonstrate the need to design more robust tracking algorithms.
Current convolutional neural networks algorithms for video object tracking spend the same amount of computation for each object and video frame. However, it is harder to track an object in some frames than others, due to the varying amount of clutter, scene complexity, amount of motion, and object's distinctiveness against its background. We propose a depth-adaptive convolutional Siamese network that performs video tracking adaptively at multiple neural network depths. Parametric gating functions are trained to control the depth of the convolutional feature extractor by minimizing a joint loss of computational cost and tracking error. Our network achieves accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art on the VOT2016 benchmark. Furthermore, our adaptive depth computation achieves higher accuracy for a given computational cost than traditional fixed-structure neural networks. The presented framework extends to other tasks that use convolutional neural networks and enables trading speed for accuracy at runtime.
Hyperspectral imaging holds enormous potential to improve the state-of-the-art in aerial vehicle tracking with low spatial and temporal resolutions. Recently, adaptive multi-modal hyperspectral sensors, controlled by Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) methodology, have attracted growing interest due to their ability to record extended data quickly from the aerial platforms. In this study, we apply popular concepts from traditional object tracking - (1) Kernelized Correlation Filters (KCF) and (2) Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features - to the hyperspectral aerial tracking domain. Specifically, we propose the Deep Hyperspectral Kernelized Correlation Filter based tracker (DeepHKCF) to efficiently track aerial vehicles using an adaptive multi-modal hyperspectral sensor. We address low temporal resolution by designing a single KCF-in-multiple Regions-of-Interest (ROIs) approach to cover a reasonable large area. To increase the speed of deep convolutional features extraction from multiple ROIs, we design an effective ROI mapping strategy. The proposed tracker also provides flexibility to couple it to the more advanced correlation filter trackers. The DeepHKCF tracker performs exceptionally with deep features set up in a synthetic hyperspectral video generated by the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) software. Additionally, we generate a large, synthetic, single-channel dataset using DIRSIG to perform vehicle classification in the Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) platform . This way, the high-fidelity of the DIRSIG software is proved and a large scale aerial vehicle classification dataset is released to support studies on vehicle detection and tracking in the WAMI platform.