Rotation Adaptive Visual Object Tracking with Motion Consistency

Visual Object tracking research has undergone significant improvement in the past few years. The emergence of tracking by detection approach in tracking paradigm has been quite successful in many ways. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have been extensively used in most successful trackers. Yet, the standard approach has been based on correlation or feature selection with minimal consideration given to motion consistency. Thus, there is still a need to capture various physical constraints through motion consistency which will improve accuracy, robustness and more importantly rotation adaptiveness. Therefore, one of the major aspects of this paper is to investigate the outcome of rotation adaptiveness in visual object tracking. Among other key contributions, the paper also includes various consistencies that turn out to be extremely effective in numerous challenging sequences than the current state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted conference paper WACV 201

RANet: Ranking Attention Network for Fast Video Object Segmentation

Despite online learning (OL) techniques have boosted the performance of semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) methods, the huge time costs of OL greatly restrict their practicality. Matching based and propagation based methods run at a faster speed by avoiding OL techniques. However, they are limited by sub-optimal accuracy, due to mismatching and drifting problems. In this paper, we develop a real-time yet very accurate Ranking Attention Network (RANet) for VOS. Specifically, to integrate the insights of matching based and propagation based methods, we employ an encoder-decoder framework to learn pixel-level similarity and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. To better utilize the similarity maps, we propose a novel ranking attention module, which automatically ranks and selects these maps for fine-grained VOS performance. Experiments on DAVIS-16 and DAVIS-17 datasets show that our RANet achieves the best speed-accuracy trade-off, e.g., with 33 milliseconds per frame and J&F=85.5% on DAVIS-16. With OL, our RANet reaches J&F=87.1% on DAVIS-16, exceeding state-of-the-art VOS methods. The code can be found at https://github.com/Storife/RANet.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 2019. 10 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. The supplementary file can be found at https://csjunxu.github.io/paper/2019ICCV/RANet_supp.pdf ; Code is available at https://github.com/Storife/RANe

LightTrack: A Generic Framework for Online Top-Down Human Pose Tracking

In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object tracking. We also propose a Siamese Graph Convolution Network (SGCN) for human pose matching as a Re-ID module in our pose tracking system. In contrary to other Re-ID modules, we use a graphical representation of human joints for matching. The skeleton-based representation effectively captures human pose similarity and is computationally inexpensive. It is robust to sudden camera shift that introduces human drifting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to propose an online human pose tracking framework in a top-down fashion. The proposed framework is general enough to fit other pose estimators and candidate matching mechanisms. Our method outperforms other online methods while maintaining a much higher frame rate, and is very competitive with our offline state-of-the-art. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/Guanghan/lighttrack.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 6 table

Target-Aware Deep Tracking

Existing deep trackers mainly use convolutional neural networks pre-trained for generic object recognition task for representations. Despite demonstrated successes for numerous vision tasks, the contributions of using pre-trained deep features for visual tracking are not as significant as that for object recognition. The key issue is that in visual tracking the targets of interest can be arbitrary object class with arbitrary forms. As such, pre-trained deep features are less effective in modeling these targets of arbitrary forms for distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to learn target-aware features, which can better recognize the targets undergoing significant appearance variations than pre-trained deep features. To this end, we develop a regression loss and a ranking loss to guide the generation of target-active and scale-sensitive features. We identify the importance of each convolutional filter according to the back-propagated gradients and select the target-aware features based on activations for representing the targets. The target-aware features are integrated with a Siamese matching network for visual tracking. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201

Recurrent Filter Learning for Visual Tracking

Recently using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has gained popularity in visual tracking, due to its robust feature representation of images. Recent methods perform online tracking by fine-tuning a pre-trained CNN model to the specific target object using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) back-propagation, which is usually time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a recurrent filter generation methods for visual tracking. We directly feed the target's image patch to a recurrent neural network (RNN) to estimate an object-specific filter for tracking. As the video sequence is a spatiotemporal data, we extend the matrix multiplications of the fully-connected layers of the RNN to a convolution operation on feature maps, which preserves the target's spatial structure and also is memory-efficient. The tracked object in the subsequent frames will be fed into the RNN to adapt the generated filters to appearance variations of the target. Note that once the off-line training process of our network is finished, there is no need to fine-tune the network for specific objects, which makes our approach more efficient than methods that use iterative fine-tuning to online learn the target. Extensive experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks, OTB and VOT, demonstrate encouraging results compared to other recent methods.Comment: ICCV2017 Workshop on VO

An In-Depth Analysis of Visual Tracking with Siamese Neural Networks

This survey presents a deep analysis of the learning and inference capabilities in nine popular trackers. It is neither intended to study the whole literature nor is it an attempt to review all kinds of neural networks proposed for visual tracking. We focus instead on Siamese neural networks which are a promising starting point for studying the challenging problem of tracking. These networks integrate efficiently feature learning and the temporal matching and have so far shown state-of-the-art performance. In particular, the branches of Siamese networks, their layers connecting these branches, specific aspects of training and the embedding of these networks into the tracker are highlighted. Quantitative results from existing papers are compared with the conclusion that the current evaluation methodology shows problems with the reproducibility and the comparability of results. The paper proposes a novel Lisp-like formalism for a better comparison of trackers. This assumes a certain functional design and functional decomposition of trackers. The paper tries to give foundation for tracker design by a formulation of the problem based on the theory of machine learning and by the interpretation of a tracker as a decision function. The work concludes with promising lines of research and suggests future work.Comment: submitted to IEEE TPAM

CRACT: Cascaded Regression-Align-Classification for Robust Visual Tracking

High quality object proposals are crucial in visual tracking algorithms that utilize region proposal network (RPN). Refinement of these proposals, typically by box regression and classification in parallel, has been popularly adopted to boost tracking performance. However, it still meets problems when dealing with complex and dynamic background. Thus motivated, in this paper we introduce an improved proposal refinement module, Cascaded Regression-Align-Classification (CRAC), which yields new state-of-the-art performances on many benchmarks. First, having observed that the offsets from box regression can serve as guidance for proposal feature refinement, we design CRAC as a cascade of box regression, feature alignment and box classification. The key is to bridge box regression and classification via an alignment step, which leads to more accurate features for proposal classification with improved robustness. To address the variation in object appearance, we introduce an identification-discrimination component for box classification, which leverages offline reliable fine-grained template and online rich background information to distinguish the target from background. Moreover, we present pyramid RoIAlign that benefits CRAC by exploiting both the local and global cues of proposals. During inference, tracking proceeds by ranking all refined proposals and selecting the best one. In experiments on seven benchmarks including OTB-2015, UAV123, NfS, VOT-2018, TrackingNet, GOT-10k and LaSOT, our CRACT exhibits very promising results in comparison with state-of-the-art competitors and runs in real-time.Comment: tech. repor

Visual Object Tracking based on Adaptive Siamese and Motion Estimation Network

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has attracted much attention in different areas of computer vision, due to its powerful abstract feature representation. Visual object tracking is one of the interesting and important areas in computer vision that achieves remarkable improvements in recent years. In this work, we aim to improve both the motion and observation models in visual object tracking by leveraging representation power of CNNs. To this end, a motion estimation network (named MEN) is utilized to seek the most likely locations of the target and prepare a further clue in addition to the previous target position. Hence the motion estimation would be enhanced by generating a small number of candidates near two plausible positions. The generated candidates are then fed into a trained Siamese network to detect the most probable candidate. Each candidate is compared to an adaptable buffer, which is updated under a predefined condition. To take into account the target appearance changes, a weighting CNN (called WCNN) adaptively assigns weights to the final similarity scores of the Siamese network using sequence-specific information. Evaluation results on well-known benchmark datasets (OTB100, OTB50 and OTB2013) prove that the proposed tracker outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.Comment: 28 pages, 1 algorithm, 7 figures, 2 table, Submitted to Elsevier, Image and Vision Computin

Unsupervised Deep Tracking

We propose an unsupervised visual tracking method in this paper. Different from existing approaches using extensive annotated data for supervised learning, our CNN model is trained on large-scale unlabeled videos in an unsupervised manner. Our motivation is that a robust tracker should be effective in both the forward and backward predictions (i.e., the tracker can forward localize the target object in successive frames and backtrace to its initial position in the first frame). We build our framework on a Siamese correlation filter network, which is trained using unlabeled raw videos. Meanwhile, we propose a multiple-frame validation method and a cost-sensitive loss to facilitate unsupervised learning. Without bells and whistles, the proposed unsupervised tracker achieves the baseline accuracy of fully supervised trackers, which require complete and accurate labels during training. Furthermore, unsupervised framework exhibits a potential in leveraging unlabeled or weakly labeled data to further improve the tracking accuracy.Comment: to appear in CVPR 201

Prediction-Tracking-Segmentation

We introduce a prediction driven method for visual tracking and segmentation in videos. Instead of solely relying on matching with appearance cues for tracking, we build a predictive model which guides finding more accurate tracking regions efficiently. With the proposed prediction mechanism, we improve the model robustness against distractions and occlusions during tracking. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods not only on visual tracking tasks (VOT 2016 and VOT 2018) but also on video segmentation datasets (DAVIS 2016 and DAVIS 2017)