Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

The core component of most modern trackers is a discriminative classifier, tasked with distinguishing between the target and the surrounding environment. To cope with natural image changes, this classifier is typically trained with translated and scaled sample patches. Such sets of samples are riddled with redundancies—any overlapping pixels are constrained to be the same. Based on this simple observation, we propose an analytic model for datasets of thousands of translated patches. By showing that the resulting data matrix is circulant, we can diagonalize it with the discrete Fourier transform, reducing both storage and computation by several orders of magnitude. Interestingly, for linear regression our formulation is equivalent to a correlation filter, used by some of the fastest competitive trackers. For kernel regression, however, we derive a new kernelized correlation filter (KCF), that unlike other kernel algorithms has the exact same complexity as its linear counterpart. Building on it, we also propose a fast multi-channel extension of linear correlation filters, via a linear kernel, which we call dual correlation filter (DCF). Both KCF and DCF outperform top-ranking trackers such as Struck or TLD on a 50 videos benchmark, despite running at hundreds of frames-per-second, and being implemented in a few lines of code (Algorithm 1). To encourage further developments, our tracking framework was made open-source.

High-Speed Tracking with Kernelized Correlation Filters

Object tracking is one of the most important components in numerous applications of computer vision. While much progress has been made in recent years with efforts on sharing code and datasets, it is of great importance to develop a library and benchmark to gauge the state of the art. After briefly reviewing recent advances of online object tracking, we carry out large scale experiments with various evaluation criteria to understand how these algorithms perform. The test image sequences are annotated with different attributes for performance evaluation and analysis. By analyzing quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field.

/pdf/online-object-tracking-a-benchmark-10et4l3bf2.pdf

Online Object Tracking: A Benchmark

Recent advances in convolutional neural networks

Object tracking has been one of the most important and active research areas in the field of computer vision. A large number of tracking algorithms have been proposed in recent years with demonstrated success. However, the set of sequences used for evaluation is often not sufficient or is sometimes biased for certain types of algorithms. Many datasets do not have common ground-truth object positions or extents, and this makes comparisons among the reported quantitative results difficult. In addition, the initial conditions or parameters of the evaluated tracking algorithms are not the same, and thus, the quantitative results reported in literature are incomparable or sometimes contradictory. To address these issues, we carry out an extensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art online object-tracking algorithms with various evaluation criteria to understand how these methods perform within the same framework. In this work, we first construct a large dataset with ground-truth object positions and extents for tracking and introduce the sequence attributes for the performance analysis. Second, we integrate most of the publicly available trackers into one code library with uniform input and output formats to facilitate large-scale performance evaluation. Third, we extensively evaluate the performance of 31 algorithms on 100 sequences with different initialization settings. By analyzing the quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field.

/pdf/object-tracking-benchmark-o3bpdhhb3z.pdf

Object Tracking Benchmark

It is a challenging task to develop effective and efficient appearance models for robust object tracking due to factors such as pose variation, illumination change, occlusion, and motion blur. Existing online tracking algorithms often update models with samples from observations in recent frames. While much success has been demonstrated, numerous issues remain to be addressed. First, while these adaptive appearance models are data-dependent, there does not exist sufficient amount of data for online algorithms to learn at the outset. Second, online tracking algorithms often encounter the drift problems. As a result of self-taught learning, these mis-aligned samples are likely to be added and degrade the appearance models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective and efficient tracking algorithm with an appearance model based on features extracted from the multi-scale image feature space with data-independent basis. Our appearance model employs non-adaptive random projections that preserve the structure of the image feature space of objects. A very sparse measurement matrix is adopted to efficiently extract the features for the appearance model. We compress samples of foreground targets and the background using the same sparse measurement matrix. The tracking task is formulated as a binary classification via a naive Bayes classifier with online update in the compressed domain. The proposed compressive tracking algorithm runs in real-time and performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on challenging sequences in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

/pdf/real-time-compressive-tracking-1x2v4xced8.pdf

Real-time compressive tracking

http://www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~cslzhang/paper/IVC_10.pdf

Active contours with selective local or global segmentation: A new formulation and level set method

In this paper, we present a simple yet fast and robust algorithm which exploits the dense spatio-temporal context for visual tracking. Our approach formulates the spatio-temporal relationships between the object of interest and its locally dense contexts in a Bayesian framework, which models the statistical correlation between the simple low-level features (i.e., image intensity and position) from the target and its surrounding regions. The tracking problem is then posed by computing a confidence map which takes into account the prior information of the target location and thereby alleviates target location ambiguity effectively. We further propose a novel explicit scale adaptation scheme, which is able to deal with target scale variations efficiently and effectively. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is adopted for fast learning and detection in this work, which only needs 4 FFT operations. Implemented in MATLAB without code optimization, the proposed tracker runs at 350 frames per second on an i7 machine. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

/pdf/fast-visual-tracking-via-dense-spatio-temporal-context-2yv1wzzttm.pdf

Fast Visual Tracking via Dense Spatio-temporal Context Learning

http://www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/%7Ecslzhang/paper/PR_10_LIF.pdf

Active contours driven by local image fitting energy

It is a challenging task to develop effective and efficient appearance models for robust object tracking due to factors such as pose variation, illumination change, occlusion, and motion blur. Existing online tracking algorithms often update models with samples from observations in recent frames. Despite much success has been demonstrated, numerous issues remain to be addressed. First, while these adaptive appearance models are data-dependent, there does not exist sufficient amount of data for online algorithms to learn at the outset. Second, online tracking algorithms often encounter the drift problems. As a result of self-taught learning, misaligned samples are likely to be added and degrade the appearance models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective and efficient tracking algorithm with an appearance model based on features extracted from a multiscale image feature space with data-independent basis. The proposed appearance model employs non-adaptive random projections that preserve the structure of the image feature space of objects. A very sparse measurement matrix is constructed to efficiently extract the features for the appearance model. We compress sample images of the foreground target and the background using the same sparse measurement matrix. The tracking task is formulated as a binary classification via a naive Bayes classifier with online update in the compressed domain. A coarse-to-fine search strategy is adopted to further reduce the computational complexity in the detection procedure. The proposed compressive tracking algorithm runs in real-time and performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on challenging sequences in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

Kaihua Zhang

Papers

Real-time compressive tracking

Active contours with selective local or global segmentation: A new formulation and level set method

Fast Visual Tracking via Dense Spatio-temporal Context Learning

Active contours driven by local image fitting energy

Fast Compressive Tracking