Evaluation of trackers for Pan-Tilt-Zoom Scenarios

Tracking with a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera has been a research topic in computer vision for many years. Compared to tracking with a still camera, the images captured with a PTZ camera are highly dynamic in nature because the camera can perform large motion resulting in quickly changing capture conditions. Furthermore, tracking with a PTZ camera involves camera control to position the camera on the target. For successful tracking and camera control, the tracker must be fast enough, or has to be able to predict accurately the next position of the target. Therefore, standard benchmarks do not allow to assess properly the quality of a tracker for the PTZ scenario. In this work, we use a virtual PTZ framework to evaluate different tracking algorithms and compare their performances. We also extend the framework to add target position prediction for the next frame, accounting for camera motion and processing delays. By doing this, we can assess if predicting can make long-term tracking more robust as it may help slower algorithms for keeping the target in the field of view of the camera. Results confirm that both speed and robustness are required for tracking under the PTZ scenario.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence 201

Remove Cosine Window from Correlation Filter-based Visual Trackers: When and How

Correlation filters (CFs) have been continuously advancing the state-of-the-art tracking performance and have been extensively studied in the recent few years. Most of the existing CF trackers adopt a cosine window to spatially reweight base image to alleviate boundary discontinuity. However, cosine window emphasizes more on the central region of base image and has the risk of contaminating negative training samples during model learning. On the other hand, spatial regularization deployed in many recent CF trackers plays a similar role as cosine window by enforcing spatial penalty on CF coefficients. Therefore, we in this paper investigate the feasibility to remove cosine window from CF trackers with spatial regularization. When simply removing cosine window, CF with spatial regularization still suffers from small degree of boundary discontinuity. To tackle this issue, binary and Gaussian shaped mask functions are further introduced for eliminating boundary discontinuity while reweighting the estimation error of each training sample, and can be incorporated with multiple CF trackers with spatial regularization. In comparison to the counterparts with cosine window, our methods are effective in handling boundary discontinuity and sample contamination, thereby benefiting tracking performance. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that our methods perform favorably against the state-of-the-art trackers using either handcrafted or deep CNN features. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lifeng9472/Removing_cosine_window_from_CF_trackers.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processin