Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking
20 Jun 2021-pp 1571-1580
TL;DR: In this article, a Siamese-like tracking pipeline is proposed to exploit the rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which have been largely overlooked in existing trackers. And the proposed transformer-assisted tracking framework is neat and trained in an end-to-end manner.
Abstract: In video object tracking, there exist rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which have been largely overlooked in existing trackers. In this work, we bridge the individual video frames and explore the temporal contexts across them via a transformer architecture for robust object tracking. Different from classic usage of the transformer in natural language processing tasks, we separate its encoder and decoder into two parallel branches and carefully design them within the Siamese-like tracking pipelines. The transformer encoder promotes the target templates via attention-based feature reinforcement, which benefits the high-quality tracking model generation. The transformer decoder propagates the tracking cues from previous templates to the current frame, which facilitates the object searching process. Our transformer-assisted tracking framework is neat and trained in an end-to-end manner. With the proposed transformer, a simple Siamese matching approach is able to outperform the current top-performing trackers. By combining our transformer with the recent discriminative tracking pipeline, our method sets several new state-of-the-art records on prevalent tracking benchmarks.
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TL;DR: Transformer as discussed by the authors is a type of deep neural network mainly based on the self-attention mechanism, which has been applied to the field of natural language processing, and has been shown to perform similar to or better than other types of networks such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks.
Abstract: Transformer, first applied to the field of natural language processing, is a type of deep neural network mainly based on the self-attention mechanism. Thanks to its strong representation capabilities, researchers are looking at ways to apply transformer to computer vision tasks. In a variety of visual benchmarks, transformer-based models perform similar to or better than other types of networks such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Given its high performance and less need for vision-specific inductive bias, transformer is receiving more and more attention from the computer vision community. In this paper, we review these vision transformer models by categorizing them in different tasks and analyzing their advantages and disadvantages. The main categories we explore include the backbone network, high/mid-level vision, low-level vision, and video processing. We also include efficient transformer methods for pushing transformer into real device-based applications. Furthermore, we also take a brief look at the self-attention mechanism in computer vision, as it is the base component in transformer. Toward the end of this paper, we discuss the challenges and provide several further research directions for vision transformers.
221 citations
TL;DR: This work proposes a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer), which can seamlessly integrate the merits of convolution and self-attention in a concise transformer format, and adopts it for various vision tasks from image to video domain, from classification to dense prediction.
Abstract: It is a challenging task to learn discriminative representation from images and videos, due to large local redundancy and complex global dependency in these visual data. Convolution neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have been two dominant frameworks in the past few years. Though CNNs can efficiently decrease local redundancy by convolution within a small neighborhood, the limited receptive field makes it hard to capture global dependency. Alternatively, ViTs can effectively capture long-range dependency via self-attention, while blind similarity comparisons among all the tokens lead to high redundancy. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer), which can seamlessly integrate the merits of convolution and self-attention in a concise transformer format. Different from the typical transformer blocks, the relation aggregators in our UniFormer block are equipped with local and global token affinity respectively in shallow and deep layers, allowing tackling both redundancy and dependency for efficient and effective representation learning. Finally, we flexibly stack our blocks into a new powerful backbone, and adopt it for various vision tasks from image to video domain, from classification to dense prediction. Without any extra training data, our UniFormer achieves 86.3 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1 K classification task. With only ImageNet-1 K pre-training, it can simply achieve state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of downstream tasks. It obtains 82.9/84.8 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400/600, 60.9/71.2 top-1 accuracy on Something-Something V1/V2 video classification tasks, 53.8 box AP and 46.4 mask AP on COCO object detection task, 50.8 mIoU on ADE20 K semantic segmentation task, and 77.4 AP on COCO pose estimation task. Moreover, we build an efficient UniFormer with a concise hourglass design of token shrinking and recovering, which achieves 2-4[Formula: see text] higher throughput than the recent lightweight models. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniFormer.
80 citations
21 Mar 2022
TL;DR: This paper proposes a compact tracking framework, termed as MixFormer, built upon transformers, to utilize the flexibility of attention operations, and proposes a Mixed Attention Module (MAM) for simultaneous feature extraction and target information integration.
Abstract: Tracking often uses a multistage pipeline of feature extraction, target information integration, and bounding box estimation. To simplify this pipeline and unify the process of feature extraction and target information integration, we present a compact tracking framework, termed as MixFormer, built upon transformers. Our core design is to utilize the flexibility of attention operations, and propose a Mixed Attention Module (MAM) for simultaneous feature extraction and target information integration. This synchronous modeling scheme allows to extract target-specific discriminative features and perform extensive communication between target and search area. Based on MAM, we build our MixFormer tracking framework simply by stacking multiple MAMs with progressive patch embedding and placing a localization head on top. In addition, to handle multiple target templates during online tracking, we devise an asymmetric attention scheme in MAM to reduce computational cost, and propose an effective score prediction module to select high-quality templates. Our MixFormer sets a new state-of-the-art performance on five tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, TrackingNet, VOT2020, GOT-10k, and UAV123. In particular, our MixFormer-L achieves NP score of 79.9% on LaSOT, 88.9% on TrackingNet and EAO of 0.555 on VOT2020. We also perform in-depth ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of simultaneous feature extraction and information integration. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MixFormer.
66 citations
22 Mar 2022
TL;DR: The proposed focal modulation network (FocalNet in short), where self-attention is completely replaced by a focal modulation module that is more effective and efficient for modeling token interactions, renders focal modulation a favorable alternative to SA forEffective and efficient visual modeling in real-world applications.
Abstract: We propose focal modulation networks (FocalNets in short), where self-attention (SA) is completely replaced by a focal modulation mechanism for modeling token interactions in vision. Focal modulation comprises three components: (i) hierarchical contextualization, implemented using a stack of depth-wise convolutional layers, to encode visual contexts from short to long ranges, (ii) gated aggregation to selectively gather contexts for each query token based on its content, and (iii) element-wise modulation or affine transformation to inject the aggregated context into the query. Extensive experiments show FocalNets outperform the state-of-the-art SA counterparts (e.g., Swin and Focal Transformers) with similar computational costs on the tasks of image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Specifically, FocalNets with tiny and base size achieve 82.3% and 83.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224 resolution, it attains 86.5% and 87.3% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224 and 384, respectively. When transferred to downstream tasks, FocalNets exhibit clear superiority. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, FocalNet base trained with 1\times outperforms the Swin counterpart by 2.1 points and already surpasses Swin trained with 3\times schedule (49.0 v.s. 48.5). For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, FocalNet base at single-scale outperforms Swin by 2.4, and beats Swin at multi-scale (50.5 v.s. 49.7). Using large FocalNet and Mask2former, we achieve 58.5 mIoU for ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 57.9 PQ for COCO Panoptic Segmentation. Using huge FocalNet and DINO, we achieved 64.3 and 64.4 mAP on COCO minival and test-dev, respectively, establishing new SoTA on top of much larger attention-based models like Swinv2-G and BEIT-3. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/microsoft/FocalNet.
47 citations
21 Mar 2022
TL;DR: This work trains the proposed tracker end-to-end and validate its performance by conducting comprehensive experiments on multiple tracking datasets, achieving an AUC of 68.5% on the challenging LaSOT [14] dataset.
Abstract: Optimization based tracking methods have been widely successful by integrating a target model prediction module, providing effective global reasoning by minimizing an objective function. While this inductive bias integrates valuable domain knowledge, it limits the expressivity of the tracking network. In this work, we therefore propose a tracker architecture employing a Transformer-based model prediction module. Transformers capture global relations with little inductive bias, allowing it to learn the prediction of more powerful target models. We further extend the model predictor to estimate a second set of weights that are applied for accurate bounding box regression. The resulting tracker ToMP relies on training and on test frame information in order to predict all weights transductively. We train the proposed tracker end-to-end and validate its performance by conducting comprehensive experiments on multiple tracking datasets. ToMP sets a new state of the art on three benchmarks, achieving an AUC of 68.5% on the challenging LaSOT [14] dataset. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking
44 citations
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TL;DR: A new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context.
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TL;DR: BERT as mentioned in this paper pre-trains deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers, which can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks.
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