DroTrack: High-speed Drone-based Object Tracking Under Uncertainty

We present DroTrack, a high-speed visual single-object tracking framework for drone-captured video sequences. Most of the existing object tracking methods are designed to tackle well-known challenges, such as occlusion and cluttered backgrounds. The complex motion of drones, i.e., multiple degrees of freedom in three-dimensional space, causes high uncertainty. The uncertainty problem leads to inaccurate location predictions and fuzziness in scale estimations. DroTrack solves such issues by discovering the dependency between object representation and motion geometry. We implement an effective object segmentation based on Fuzzy C Means (FCM). We incorporate the spatial information into the membership function to cluster the most discriminative segments. We then enhance the object segmentation by using a pre-trained Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. DroTrack also leverages the geometrical angular motion to estimate a reliable object scale. We discuss the experimental results and performance evaluation using two datasets of 51,462 drone-captured frames. The combination of the FCM segmentation and the angular scaling increased DroTrack precision by up to $9\%$ and decreased the centre location error by $162$ pixels on average. DroTrack outperforms all the high-speed trackers and achieves comparable results in comparison to deep learning trackers. DroTrack offers high frame rates up to 1000 frame per second (fps) with the best location precision, more than a set of state-of-the-art real-time trackers.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, FUZZ-IEEE 202

Vision-based Real-Time Aerial Object Localization and Tracking for UAV Sensing System

The paper focuses on the problem of vision-based obstacle detection and tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. A real-time object localization and tracking strategy from monocular image sequences is developed by effectively integrating the object detection and tracking into a dynamic Kalman model. At the detection stage, the object of interest is automatically detected and localized from a saliency map computed via the image background connectivity cue at each frame; at the tracking stage, a Kalman filter is employed to provide a coarse prediction of the object state, which is further refined via a local detector incorporating the saliency map and the temporal information between two consecutive frames. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approach does not require any manual initialization for tracking, runs much faster than the state-of-the-art trackers of its kind, and achieves competitive tracking performance on a large number of image sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed approach.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Deep-LK for Efficient Adaptive Object Tracking

In this paper we present a new approach for efficient regression based object tracking which we refer to as Deep- LK. Our approach is closely related to the Generic Object Tracking Using Regression Networks (GOTURN) framework of Held et al. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate that there is a theoretical relationship between siamese regression networks like GOTURN and the classical Inverse-Compositional Lucas & Kanade (IC-LK) algorithm. Further, we demonstrate that unlike GOTURN IC-LK adapts its regressor to the appearance of the currently tracked frame. We argue that this missing property in GOTURN can be attributed to its poor performance on unseen objects and/or viewpoints. Second, we propose a novel framework for object tracking - which we refer to as Deep-LK - that is inspired by the IC-LK framework. Finally, we show impressive results demonstrating that Deep-LK substantially outperforms GOTURN. Additionally, we demonstrate comparable tracking performance to current state of the art deep-trackers whilst being an order of magnitude (i.e. 100 FPS) computationally efficient

Long-Term Visual Object Tracking Benchmark

We propose a new long video dataset (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and benchmark for single object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 HD videos from real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long sequences and (b) the accuracy of trackers abruptly drops on challenging long sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction of long-term tracking.Comment: ACCV 2018 (Oral

Visual servoing of an autonomous helicopter in urban areas using feature tracking

We present the design and implementation of a vision-based feature tracking system for an autonomous helicopter. Visual sensing is used for estimating the position and velocity of features in the image plane (urban features like windows) in order to generate velocity references for the flight control. These visual-based references are then combined with GPS-positioning references to navigate towards these features and then track them. We present results from experimental flight trials, performed in two UAV systems and under different conditions that show the feasibility and robustness of our approach