No Arabic abstract
In recent years, deep-learning-based visual object trackers have been studied thoroughly, but handling occlusions and/or rapid motion of the target remains challenging. In this work, we argue that conditioning on the natural language (NL) description of a target provides information for longer-term invariance, and thus helps cope with typical tracking challenges. However, deriving a formulation to combine the strengths of appearance-based tracking with the language modality is not straightforward. We propose a novel deep tracking-by-detection formulation that can take advantage of NL descriptions. Regions that are related to the given NL description are generated by a proposal network during the detection phase of the tracker. Our LSTM based tracker then predicts the update of the target from regions proposed by the NL based detection phase. In benchmarks, our method is competitive with state of the art trackers, while it outperforms all other trackers on targets with unambiguous and precise language annotations. It also beats the state-of-the-art NL tracker when initializing without a bounding box. Our method runs at over 30 fps on a single GPU.
In recent years, deep learning based visual tracking methods have obtained great success owing to the powerful feature representation ability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Among these methods, classification-based tracking methods exhibit excellent performance while their speeds are heavily limited by the expensive computation for massive proposal feature extraction. In contrast, matching-based tracking methods (such as Siamese networks) possess remarkable speed superiority. However, the absence of online updating renders these methods unadaptable to significant object appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time visual tracking method, which adopts an object-adaptive LSTM network to effectively capture the video sequential dependencies and adaptively learn the object appearance variations. For high computational efficiency, we also present a fast proposal selection strategy, which utilizes the matching-based tracking method to pre-estimate dense proposals and selects high-quality ones to feed to the LSTM network for classification. This strategy efficiently filters out some irrelevant proposals and avoids the redundant computation for feature extraction, which enables our method to operate faster than conventional classification-based tracking methods. In addition, to handle the problems of sample inadequacy and class imbalance during online tracking, we adopt a data augmentation technique based on the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to facilitate the training of the LSTM network. Extensive experiments on four visual tracking benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in terms of both tracking accuracy and speed, which exhibits great potentials of recurrent structures for visual tracking.
Modern multiple object tracking (MOT) systems usually follow the emph{tracking-by-detection} paradigm. It has 1) a detection model for target localization and 2) an appearance embedding model for data association. Having the two models separately executed might lead to efficiency problems, as the running time is simply a sum of the two steps without investigating potential structures that can be shared between them. Existing research efforts on real-time MOT usually focus on the association step, so they are essentially real-time association methods but not real-time MOT system. In this paper, we propose an MOT system that allows target detection and appearance embedding to be learned in a shared model. Specifically, we incorporate the appearance embedding model into a single-shot detector, such that the model can simultaneously output detections and the corresponding embeddings. We further propose a simple and fast association method that works in conjunction with the joint model. In both components the computation cost is significantly reduced compared with former MOT systems, resulting in a neat and fast baseline for future follow-ups on real-time MOT algorithm design. To our knowledge, this work reports the first (near) real-time MOT system, with a running speed of 22 to 40 FPS depending on the input resolution. Meanwhile, its tracking accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art trackers embodying separate detection and embedding (SDE) learning ($64.4%$ MOTA vs $66.1%$ MOTA on MOT-16 challenge). Code and models are available at url{https://github.com/Zhongdao/Towards-Realtime-MOT}.
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 task. Empirical results over tracking benchmarks with NL annotations show that the proposed SNLT improves Siamese trackers by 3 to 7 percentage points with a slight tradeoff of speed. The proposed SNLT outperforms all NL trackers to-date and is competitive among state-of-the-art real-time trackers on LaSOT benchmarks while running at 50 frames per second on a single GPU.
In multi-object tracking, the tracker maintains in its memory the appearance and motion information for each object in the scene. This memory is utilized for finding matches between tracks and detections and is updated based on the matching result. Many approaches model each target in isolation and lack the ability to use all the targets in the scene to jointly update the memory. This can be problematic when there are similar looking objects in the scene. In this paper, we solve the problem of simultaneously considering all tracks during memory updating, with only a small spatial overhead, via a novel multi-track pooling module. We additionally propose a training strategy adapted to multi-track pooling which generates hard tracking episodes online. We show that the combination of these innovations results in a strong discriminative appearance model, enabling the use of greedy data association to achieve online tracking performance. Our experiments demonstrate real-time, state-of-the-art performance on public multi-object tracking (MOT) datasets.
Visual object tracking (VOT) is an essential component for many applications, such as autonomous driving or assistive robotics. However, recent works tend to develop accurate systems based on more computationally expensive feature extractors for better instance matching. In contrast, this work addresses the importance of motion prediction in VOT. We use an off-the-shelf object detector to obtain instance bounding boxes. Then, a combination of camera motion decouple and Kalman filter is used for state estimation. Although our baseline system is a straightforward combination of standard methods, we obtain state-of-the-art results. Our method establishes new state-of-the-art performance on VOT (VOT-2016 and VOT-2018). Our proposed method improves the EAO on VOT-2016 from 0.472 of prior art to 0.505, from 0.410 to 0.431 on VOT-2018. To show the generalizability, we also test our method on video object segmentation (VOS: DAVIS-2016 and DAVIS-2017) and observe consistent improvement.