28 research outputs found
Visual object tracking performance measures revisited
The problem of visual tracking evaluation is sporting a large variety of
performance measures, and largely suffers from lack of consensus about which
measures should be used in experiments. This makes the cross-paper tracker
comparison difficult. Furthermore, as some measures may be less effective than
others, the tracking results may be skewed or biased towards particular
tracking aspects. In this paper we revisit the popular performance measures and
tracker performance visualizations and analyze them theoretically and
experimentally. We show that several measures are equivalent from the point of
information they provide for tracker comparison and, crucially, that some are
more brittle than the others. Based on our analysis we narrow down the set of
potential measures to only two complementary ones, describing accuracy and
robustness, thus pushing towards homogenization of the tracker evaluation
methodology. These two measures can be intuitively interpreted and visualized
and have been employed by the recent Visual Object Tracking (VOT) challenges as
the foundation for the evaluation methodology
Beyond standard benchmarks: Parameterizing performance evaluation in visual object tracking
Object-to-camera motion produces a variety of apparent motion patterns that
significantly affect performance of short-term visual trackers. Despite being
crucial for designing robust trackers, their influence is poorly explored in
standard benchmarks due to weakly defined, biased and overlapping attribute
annotations. In this paper we propose to go beyond pre-recorded benchmarks with
post-hoc annotations by presenting an approach that utilizes omnidirectional
videos to generate realistic, consistently annotated, short-term tracking
scenarios with exactly parameterized motion patterns. We have created an
evaluation system, constructed a fully annotated dataset of omnidirectional
videos and the generators for typical motion patterns. We provide an in-depth
analysis of major tracking paradigms which is complementary to the standard
benchmarks and confirms the expressiveness of our evaluation approach
Understanding and Diagnosing Visual Tracking Systems
Several benchmark datasets for visual tracking research have been proposed in
recent years. Despite their usefulness, whether they are sufficient for
understanding and diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of different trackers
remains questionable. To address this issue, we propose a framework by breaking
a tracker down into five constituent parts, namely, motion model, feature
extractor, observation model, model updater, and ensemble post-processor. We
then conduct ablative experiments on each component to study how it affects the
overall result. Surprisingly, our findings are discrepant with some common
beliefs in the visual tracking research community. We find that the feature
extractor plays the most important role in a tracker. On the other hand,
although the observation model is the focus of many studies, we find that it
often brings no significant improvement. Moreover, the motion model and model
updater contain many details that could affect the result. Also, the ensemble
post-processor can improve the result substantially when the constituent
trackers have high diversity. Based on our findings, we put together some very
elementary building blocks to give a basic tracker which is competitive in
performance to the state-of-the-art trackers. We believe our framework can
provide a solid baseline when conducting controlled experiments for visual
tracking research
The visual object tracking VOT2016 challenge results
The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2016 aims at comparing short-term single-object visual trackers that do not apply pre-learned models of object appearance. Results of 70 trackers are presented, with a large number of trackers being published at major computer vision conferences and journals in the recent years. The number of tested state-of-the-art trackers makes the VOT 2016 the largest and most challenging benchmark on short-term tracking to date. For each participating tracker, a short description is provided in the Appendix. The VOT2016 goes beyond its predecessors by (i) introducing a new semi-automatic ground truth bounding box annotation methodology and (ii) extending the evaluation system with the no-reset experiment. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website (http: //votchallenge.net)
Deformable Object Tracking with Gated Fusion
The tracking-by-detection framework receives growing attentions through the
integration with the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Existing
tracking-by-detection based methods, however, fail to track objects with severe
appearance variations. This is because the traditional convolutional operation
is performed on fixed grids, and thus may not be able to find the correct
response while the object is changing pose or under varying environmental
conditions. In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution layer to enrich
the target appearance representations in the tracking-by-detection framework.
We aim to capture the target appearance variations via deformable convolution,
which adaptively enhances its original features. In addition, we also propose a
gated fusion scheme to control how the variations captured by the deformable
convolution affect the original appearance. The enriched feature representation
through deformable convolution facilitates the discrimination of the CNN
classifier on the target object and background. Extensive experiments on the
standard benchmarks show that the proposed tracker performs favorably against
state-of-the-art methods
Perception Test:A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models
We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a significant gap in performance (91.4% vs 45.8%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_tes