We propose a novel visual tracking algorithm based on the representations from a discriminatively trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking groundtruths to obtain a generic target representation. Our network is composed of shared layers and multiple branches of domain-specific layers, where domains correspond to individual training sequences and each branch is responsible for binary classification to identify target in each domain. We train each domain in the network iteratively to obtain generic target representations in the shared layers. When tracking a target in a new sequence, we construct a new network by combining the shared layers in the pretrained CNN with a new binary classification layer, which is updated online. Online tracking is performed by evaluating the candidate windows randomly sampled around the previous target state. The proposed algorithm illustrates outstanding performance in existing tracking benchmarks.

/pdf/learning-multi-domain-convolutional-neural-networks-for-a7hwbgnxpx.pdf

Learning Multi-domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking

We propose a novel visual tracking algorithm based on the representations from a discriminatively trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation. Our network is composed of shared layers and multiple branches of domain-specific layers, where domains correspond to individual training sequences and each branch is responsible for binary classification to identify the target in each domain. We train the network with respect to each domain iteratively to obtain generic target representations in the shared layers. When tracking a target in a new sequence, we construct a new network by combining the shared layers in the pretrained CNN with a new binary classification layer, which is updated online. Online tracking is performed by evaluating the candidate windows randomly sampled around the previous target state. The proposed algorithm illustrates outstanding performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in existing tracking benchmarks.

Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking

Siamese network based trackers formulate tracking as convolutional feature cross-correlation between target template and searching region. However, Siamese trackers still have accuracy gap compared with state-of-the-art algorithms and they cannot take advantage of feature from deep networks, such as ResNet-50 or deeper. In this work we prove the core reason comes from the lack of strict translation invariance. By comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validations, we break this restriction through a simple yet effective spatial aware sampling strategy and successfully train a ResNet-driven Siamese tracker with significant performance gain. Moreover, we propose a new model architecture to perform depth-wise and layer-wise aggregations, which not only further improves the accuracy but also reduces the model size. We conduct extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker, which obtains currently the best results on four large tracking benchmarks, including OTB2015, VOT2018, UAV123, and LaSOT. Our model will be released to facilitate further studies based on this problem.

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SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking With Very Deep Networks

Correlation Filter-based trackers have recently achieved excellent performance, showing great robustness to challenging situations exhibiting motion blur and illumination changes. However, since the model that they learn depends strongly on the spatial layout of the tracked object, they are notoriously sensitive to deformation. Models based on colour statistics have complementary traits: they cope well with variation in shape, but suffer when illumination is not consistent throughout a sequence. Moreover, colour distributions alone can be insufficiently discriminative. In this paper, we show that a simple tracker combining complementary cues in a ridge regression framework can operate faster than 80 FPS and outperform not only all entries in the popular VOT14 competition, but also recent and far more sophisticated trackers according to multiple benchmarks.

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Staple: Complementary Learners for Real-Time Tracking

In this paper, we propose a new aerial video dataset and benchmark for low altitude UAV target tracking, as well as, a photo-realistic UAV simulator that can be coupled with tracking methods. Our benchmark provides the first evaluation of many state-of-the-art and popular trackers on 123 new and fully annotated HD video sequences captured from a low-altitude aerial perspective. Among the compared trackers, we determine which ones are the most suitable for UAV tracking both in terms of tracking accuracy and run-time. The simulator can be used to evaluate tracking algorithms in real-time scenarios before they are deployed on a UAV “in the field”, as well as, generate synthetic but photo-realistic tracking datasets with automatic ground truth annotations to easily extend existing real-world datasets. Both the benchmark and simulator are made publicly available to the vision community on our website to further research in the area of object tracking from UAVs. (https://ivul.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/pub-benchmark-simulator-uav.aspx.).

/pdf/a-benchmark-and-simulator-for-uav-tracking-1uj73gzc8j.pdf

A Benchmark and Simulator for UAV Tracking

Variations in the appearance of a tracked object, such as changes in geometry/photometry, camera viewpoint, illumination, or partial occlusion, pose a major challenge to object tracking. Here, we adopt cognitive psychology principles to design a flexible representation that can adapt to changes in object appearance during tracking. Inspired by the well-known Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model, we propose MUlti-Store Tracker (MUSTer), a dual-component approach consisting of short- and long-term memory stores to process target appearance memories. A powerful and efficient Integrated Correlation Filter (ICF) is employed in the short-term store for short-term tracking. The integrated long-term component, which is based on keypoint matching-tracking and RANSAC estimation, can interact with the long-term memory and provide additional information for output control. MUSTer was extensively evaluated on the CVPR2013 Online Object Tracking Benchmark (OOTB) and ALOV++ datasets. The experimental results demonstrated the superior performance of MUSTer in comparison with other state-of-art trackers.

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MUlti-Store Tracker (MUSTer): A cognitive psychology inspired approach to object tracking

Combining multiple observation views has proven beneficial for tracking. In this paper, we cast tracking as a novel multi-task multi-view sparse learning problem and exploit the cues from multiple views including various types of visual features, such as intensity, color, and edge, where each feature observation can be sparsely represented by a linear combination of atoms from an adaptive feature dictionary. The proposed method is integrated in a particle filter framework where every view in each particle is regarded as an individual task. We jointly consider the underlying relationship between tasks across different views and different particles, and tackle it in a unified robust multi-task formulation. In addition, to capture the frequently emerging outlier tasks, we decompose the representation matrix to two collaborative components which enable a more robust and accurate approximation. We show that the proposed formulation can be efficiently solved using the Accelerated Proximal Gradient method with a small number of closed-form updates. The presented tracker is implemented using four types of features and is tested on numerous benchmark video sequences. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to several state-of-the-art trackers.

/pdf/tracking-via-robust-multi-task-multi-view-joint-sparse-501dwpdp3k.pdf

Tracking via Robust Multi-task Multi-view Joint Sparse Representation

Recent works have made great progress in semantic segmentation by exploiting richer context, most of which are designed from a spatial perspective. In contrast to previous works, we present the concept of class center which extracts the global context from a categorical perspective. This class-level context describes the overall representation of each class in an image. We further propose a novel module, named Attentional Class Feature (ACF) module, to calculate and adaptively combine different class centers according to each pixel. Based on the ACF module, we introduce a coarse-to-fine segmentation network, called Attentional Class Feature Network (ACFNet), which can be composed of an ACF module and any off-the-shell segmentation network (base network). In this paper, we use two types of base networks to evaluate the effectiveness of ACFNet. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance of 81.85% mIoU on Cityscapes dataset with only finely annotated data used for training.

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ACFNet: Attentional Class Feature Network for Semantic Segmentation

Over these years, Correlation Filter-based Trackers (CFTs) have aroused increasing interests in the field of visual object tracking, and have achieved extremely compelling results in different competitions and benchmarks. In this paper, our goal is to review the developments of CFTs with extensive experimental results. 11 trackers are surveyed in our work, based on which a general framework is summarized. Furthermore, we investigate different training schemes for correlation filters, and also discuss various effective improvements that have been made recently. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the surveyed CFTs, and comparisons have been made with other competing trackers. The experimental results have shown that state-of-art performance, in terms of robustness, speed and accuracy, can be achieved by several recent CFTs, such as MUSTer and SAMF. We find that further improvements for correlation filter-based tracking can be made on estimating scales, applying part-based tracking strategy and cooperating with long-term tracking methods.

Zhibin Hong

Papers

MUlti-Store Tracker (MUSTer): A cognitive psychology inspired approach to object tracking

Tracking via Robust Multi-task Multi-view Joint Sparse Representation

ACFNet: Attentional Class Feature Network for Semantic Segmentation

ACFNet: Attentional Class Feature Network for Semantic Segmentation

An Experimental Survey on Correlation Filter-based Tracking.