We present a semi-supervised approach that localizes multiple unknown object instances in long videos. We start with a handful of labeled boxes and iteratively learn and label hundreds of thousands of object instances. We propose criteria for reliable object detection and tracking for constraining the semi-supervised learning process and minimizing semantic drift. Our approach does not assume exhaustive labeling of each object instance in any single frame, or any explicit annotation of negative data. Working in such a generic setting allow us to tackle multiple object instances in video, many of which are static. In contrast, existing approaches either do not consider multiple object instances per video, or rely heavily on the motion of the objects present. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating the automatically labeled data on a variety of metrics like quality, coverage (recall), diversity, and relevance to training an object detector.
Multi-object tracking-by-detection approaches also focus on solving the problem of - given object locations across multiple frames, determine which locations belong to the same object. Data association is critical for long term tracking, and is also very challenging @cite_38 . In contrast, our goal is not to track over long periods, but to get short and reliable tracking. Moreover, we do not require these short tracklets to be associated with each other, and thus have minimal need for data association.
@cite_38
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This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous tracking of multiple targets in a video. We first apply object detectors to every video frame. Pairs of detection responses from every two consecutive frames are then used to build a graph of tracklets. The graph helps transitively link the best matching tracklets that do not violate hard and soft contextual constraints between the resulting tracks. We prove that this data association problem can be formulated as finding the maximum-weight independent set (MWIS) of the graph. We present a new, polynomial-time MWIS algorithm, and prove that it converges to an optimum. Similarity and contextual constraints between object detections, used for data association, are learned online from object appearance and motion properties. Long-term occlusions are addressed by iteratively repeating MWIS to hierarchically merge smaller tracks into longer ones. Our results demonstrate advantages of simultaneously accounting for soft and hard contextual constraints in multitarget tracking. We outperform the state of the art on the benchmark datasets. We present a detection-based three-level hierarchical association approach to robustly track multiple objects in crowded environments from a single camera. At the low level, reliable tracklets (i.e. short tracks for further analysis) are generated by linking detection responses based on conservative affinity constraints. At the middle level, these tracklets are further associated to form longer tracklets based on more complex affinity measures. The association is formulated as a MAP problem and solved by the Hungarian algorithm. At the high level, entries, exits and scene occluders are estimated using the already computed tracklets, which are used to refine the final trajectories. This approach is applied to the pedestrian class and evaluated on two challenging datasets. The experimental results show a great improvement in performance compared to previous methods. Multi-target tracking is an interesting but challenging task in computer vision field. Most previous data association based methods merely consider the relationships (e.g. appearance and motion pattern similarities) between detections in local limited temporal domain, leading to their difficulties in handling long-term occlusion and distinguishing the spatially close targets with similar appearance in crowded scenes. In this paper, a novel data association approach based on undirected hierarchical relation hypergraph is proposed, which formulates the tracking task as a hierarchical dense neighborhoods searching problem on the dynamically constructed undirected affinity graph. The relationships between different detections across the spatiotemporal domain are considered in a high-order way, which makes the tracker robust to the spatially close targets with similar appearance. Meanwhile, the hierarchical design of the optimization process fuels our tracker to long-term occlusion with more robustness. Extensive experiments on various challenging datasets (i.e. PETS2009 dataset, ParkingLot), including both low and high density sequences, demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Online multi-object tracking aims at producing complete tracks of multiple objects using the information accumulated up to the present moment. It still remains a difficult problem in complex scenes, because of frequent occlusion by clutter or other objects, similar appearances of different objects, and other factors. In this paper, we propose a robust online multi-object tracking method that can handle these difficulties effectively. We first propose the tracklet confidence using the detectability and continuity of a tracklet, and formulate a multi-object tracking problem based on the tracklet confidence. The multi-object tracking problem is then solved by associating tracklets in different ways according to their confidence values. Based on this strategy, tracklets sequentially grow with online-provided detections, and fragmented tracklets are linked up with others without any iterative and expensive associations. Here, for reliable association between tracklets and detections, we also propose a novel online learning method using an incremental linear discriminant analysis for discriminating the appearances of objects. By exploiting the proposed learning method, tracklet association can be successfully achieved even under severe occlusion. Experiments with challenging public datasets show distinct performance improvement over other batch and online tracking methods. Online multi-object tracking aims at estimating the tracks of multiple objects instantly with each incoming frame and the information provided up to the moment. It still remains a difficult problem in complex scenes, because of the large ambiguity in associating multiple objects in consecutive frames and the low discriminability between objects appearances. In this paper, we propose a robust online multi-object tracking method that can handle these difficulties effectively. We first define the tracklet confidence using the detectability and continuity of a tracklet, and decompose a multi-object tracking problem into small subproblems based on the tracklet confidence. We then solve the online multi-object tracking problem by associating tracklets and detections in different ways according to their confidence values. Based on this strategy, tracklets sequentially grow with online-provided detections, and fragmented tracklets are linked up with others without any iterative and expensive association steps. For more reliable association between tracklets and detections, we also propose a deep appearance learning method to learn a discriminative appearance model from large training datasets, since the conventional appearance learning methods do not provide rich representation that can distinguish multiple objects with large appearance variations. In addition, we combine online transfer learning for improving appearance discriminability by adapting the pre-trained deep model during online tracking. Experiments with challenging public datasets show distinct performance improvement over other state-of-the-arts batch and online tracking methods, and prove the effect and usefulness of the proposed methods for online multi-object tracking. In this paper, we propose an online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approach which integrates the merits of single object tracking and data association methods in a unified framework to handle noisy detections and frequent interactions between targets. Specifically, for applying single object tracking in MOT, we introduce a cost-sensitive tracking loss based on the state-of-the-art visual tracker, which encourages the model to focus on hard negative distractors during online learning. For data association, we propose Dual Matching Attention Networks (DMAN) with both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms. The spatial attention module generates dual attention maps which enable the network to focus on the matching patterns of the input image pair, while the temporal attention module adaptively allocates different levels of attention to different samples in the tracklet to suppress noisy observations. Experimental results on the MOT benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against both online and offline trackers in terms of identity-preserving metrics. Recent work on multi-object tracking has shown the promise of tracklet-based methods. In this work we present a method which infers tracklets then groups them into tracks. It overcomes some of the disadvantages of existing methods, such as the use of heuristics or non-realistic constraints. The main idea is to formulate the data association problem as inference in a set of Bayesian networks. This avoids exhaustive evaluation of data association hypotheses, provides a confidence estimate of the solution, and handles split-merge observations. Consistency of motion and appearance is the driving force behind finding the MAP data association estimate. The computed tracklets are then used in a complete multi-object tracking algorithm, which is evaluated on a vehicle tracking task in an aerial surveillance context. Very good performance is achieved on challenging video sequences. Track fragmentation is nearly non-existent, and false alarm rates are low. Online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has wide applications in time-critical video analysis scenarios, such as robot navigation and autonomous driving. In tracking-by-detection, a major challenge of online MOT is how to robustly associate noisy object detections on a new video frame with previously tracked objects. In this work, we formulate the online MOT problem as decision making in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the lifetime of an object is modeled with a MDP. Learning a similarity function for data association is equivalent to learning a policy for the MDP, and the policy learning is approached in a reinforcement learning fashion which benefits from both advantages of offline-learning and online-learning for data association. Moreover, our framework can naturally handle the birth death and appearance disappearance of targets by treating them as state transitions in the MDP while leveraging existing online single object tracking methods. We conduct experiments on the MOT Benchmark [24] to verify the effectiveness of our method. This paper presents an online detection-based two-stage multi-object tracking method in dense visual surveillances scenarios with a single camera. In the local stage, a particle filter with observer selection that could deal with partial object occlusion is used to generate a set of reliable tracklets. In the global stage, the detection responses are collected from a temporal sliding window to deal with ambiguity caused by full object occlusion to generate a set of potential tracklets. The reliable tracklets generated in the local stage and the potential tracklets generated within the temporal sliding window are associated by Hungarian algorithm on a modified pairwise tracklets association cost matrix to get the global optimal association. This method is applied to the pedestrian class and evaluated on two challenging datasets. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of our method. This paper presents a novel framework for tracking thousands of vehicles in high resolution, low frame rate, multiple camera aerial videos. The proposed algorithm avoids the pitfalls of global minimization of data association costs and instead maintains multiple object-centric associations for each track. Representation of object state in terms of many to many data associations per track is proposed and multiple novel constraints are introduced to make the association problem tractable while allowing sharing of detections among tracks. Weighted hypothetical measurements are introduced to better handle occlusions, mis-detections and split or merged detections. A two-frame differencing method is presented which performs simultaneous moving object detection in both. Two novel contextual constraints of vehicle following model, and discouragement of track intersection and merging are also proposed. Extensive experiments on challenging, ground truthed data sets are performed to show the feasibility and superiority of the proposed approach. Results of quantitative comparison with existing approaches are presented, and the efficacy of newly introduced constraints is experimentally established. The proposed algorithm performs better and faster than global, 1---1 data association methods. We present a novel approach for multi-object tracking which considers object detection and spacetime trajectory estimation as a coupled optimization problem. Our approach is formulated in a minimum description length hypothesis selection framework, which allows our system to recover from mismatches and temporarily lost tracks. Building upon a state-of-the-art object detector, it performs multiview multicategory object recognition to detect cars and pedestrians in the input images. The 2D object detections are checked for their consistency with (automatically estimated) scene geometry and are converted to 3D observations which are accumulated in a world coordinate frame. A subsequent trajectory estimation module analyzes the resulting 3D observations to find physically plausible spacetime trajectories. Tracking is achieved by performing model selection after every frame. At each time instant, our approach searches for the globally optimal set of spacetime trajectories which provides the best explanation for the current image and for all evidence collected so far while satisfying the constraints that no two objects may occupy the same physical space nor explain the same image pixels at any point in time. Successful trajectory hypotheses are then fed back to guide object detection in future frames. The optimization procedure is kept efficient through incremental computation and conservative hypothesis pruning. We evaluate our approach on several challenging video sequences and demonstrate its performance on both a surveillance-type scenario and a scenario where the input videos are taken from inside a moving vehicle passing through crowded city areas. Multi-object tracking can be achieved by detecting objects in individual frames and then linking detections across frames. Such an approach can be made very robust to the occasional detection failure: If an object is not detected in a frame but is in previous and following ones, a correct trajectory will nevertheless be produced. By contrast, a false-positive detection in a few frames will be ignored. However, when dealing with a multiple target problem, the linking step results in a difficult optimization problem in the space of all possible families of trajectories. This is usually dealt with by sampling or greedy search based on variants of Dynamic Programming which can easily miss the global optimum. In this paper, we show that reformulating that step as a constrained flow optimization results in a convex problem. We take advantage of its particular structure to solve it using the k-shortest paths algorithm, which is very fast. This new approach is far simpler formally and algorithmically than existing techniques and lets us demonstrate excellent performance in two very different contexts. The task of tracking extended objects or (partly) unresolvable group targets raises new challenges for both data association and track maintenance. Due to limited sensor resolution capabilities, group targets (i.e., a number of closely spaced targets moving in a coordinated fashion) may show a similar detection pattern as extended objects, namely a varying number of detections whose spread is determined by both the statistical sensor errors as well as the physical extension of the group or extended object. In both cases, tracking and data association under the “one target-one detection” assumption are no longer applicable. This paper deals with the problem of maintaining a track for an extended object or group target with varying number of detections. Herein, object extension is represented by a symmetric positive definite random matrix. A recently published Bayesian approach to tackling this problem is analyzed and discussed. From there, a new approach is derived that is expected to overcome some of the weaknesses the mentioned Bayesian approach suffers from in certain applications. We propose a tracking framework that mediates grouping cues from two levels of tracking granularities, detection tracklets and point trajectories, for segmenting objects in crowded scenes. Detection tracklets capture objects when they are mostly visible. They may be sparse in time, may miss partially occluded or deformed objects, or contain false positives. Point trajectories are dense in space and time. Their affinities integrate long range motion and 3D disparity information, useful for segmentation. Affinities may leak though across similarly moving objects, since they lack model knowledge. We establish one trajectory and one detection tracklet graph, encoding grouping affinities in each space and associations across. Two-granularity tracking is cast as simultaneous detection tracklet classification and clustering (cl2) in the joint space of tracklets and trajectories. We solve cl2 by explicitly mediating contradictory affinities in the two graphs: Detection tracklet classification modifies trajectory affinities to reflect object specific dis-associations. Non-accidental grouping alignment between detection tracklets and trajectory clusters boosts or rejects corresponding detection tracklets, changing accordingly their classification.We show our model can track objects through sparse, inaccurate detections and persistent partial occlusions. It adapts to the changing visibility masks of the targets, in contrast to detection based bounding box trackers, by effectively switching between the two granularities according to object occlusions, deformations and background clutter. Robust multi-object tracking-by-detection requires the correct assignment of noisy detection results to object trajectories. We address this problem by proposing an online approach based on the observation that object detectors primarily fail if objects are significantly occluded. In contrast to most existing work, we only rely on geometric information to efficiently overcome detection failures. In particular, we exploit the spatio-temporal evolution of occlusion regions, detector reliability, and target motion prediction to robustly handle missed detections. In combination with a conservative association scheme for visible objects, this allows for real-time tracking of multiple objects from a single static camera, even in complex scenarios. Our evaluations on publicly available multi-object tracking benchmark datasets demonstrate favorable performance compared to the state-of-the-art in online and offline multi-object tracking. We address the problem of multi-person tracking in a complex scene from a single camera. Although tracklet-association methods have shown impressive results in several challenging datasets, discriminability of the appearance model remains a limitation. Inspired by the work of person identity recognition, we obtain discriminative appearance-based affinity models by a novel framework to incorporate the merits of person identity recognition, which help multi-person tracking performance. During off-line learning, a small set of local image descriptors is selected to be used in on-line learned appearances-based affinity models effectively and efficiently. Given short but reliable track-lets generated by frame-to-frame association of detection responses, we identify them as query tracklets and gallery tracklets. For each gallery tracklet, a target-specific appearance model is learned from the on-line training samples collected by spatio-temporal constraints. Both gallery tracklets and query tracklets are fed into hierarchical association framework to obtain final tracking results. We evaluate our proposed system on several public datasets and show significant improvements in terms of tracking evaluation metrics. Many state-of-the-art approaches to multi-object tracking rely on detecting them in each frame independently, grouping detections into short but reliable trajectory segments, and then further grouping them into full trajectories. This grouping typically relies on imposing local smoothness constraints but almost never on enforcing more global ones on the trajectories.,,In this paper, we propose a non-Markovian approach to imposing global consistency by using behavioral patterns to guide the tracking algorithm. When used in conjunction with state-of-the-art tracking algorithms, this further increases their already good performance on multiple challenging datasets. We show significant improvements both in supervised settings where ground truth is available and behavioral patterns can be learned from it, and in completely unsupervised settings. Recent approaches for high accuracy detection and tracking of object categories in video consist of complex multistage solutions that become more cumbersome each year. In this paper we propose a ConvNet architecture that jointly performs detection and tracking, solving the task in a simple and effective way. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we set up a ConvNet architecture for simultaneous detection and tracking, using a multi-task objective for frame-based object detection and across-frame track regression; (ii) we introduce correlation features that represent object co-occurrences across time to aid the ConvNet during tracking; and (iii) we link the frame level detections based on our across-frame tracklets to produce high accuracy detections at the video level. Our ConvNet architecture for spatiotemporal object detection is evaluated on the large-scale ImageNet VID dataset where it achieves state-of-the-art results. Our approach provides better single model performance than the winning method of the last ImageNet challenge while being conceptually much simpler. Finally, we show that by increasing the temporal stride we can dramatically increase the tracker speed. Recent approaches for high accuracy detection and tracking of object categories in video consist of complex multistage solutions that become more cumbersome each year. In this paper we propose a ConvNet architecture that jointly performs detection and tracking, solving the task in a simple and effective way. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we set up a ConvNet architecture for simultaneous detection and tracking, using a multi-task objective for frame-based object detection and across-frame track regression; (ii) we introduce correlation features that represent object co-occurrences across time to aid the ConvNet during tracking; and (iii) we link the frame level detections based on our across-frame tracklets to produce high accuracy detections at the video level. Our ConvNet architecture for spatiotemporal object detection is evaluated on the large-scale ImageNet VID dataset where it achieves state-of-the-art results. Our approach provides better single model performance than the winning method of the last ImageNet challenge while being conceptually much simpler. Finally, we show that by increasing the temporal stride we can dramatically increase the tracker speed. Long term tracking of an object, given only a single instance in an initial frame, remains an open problem. We propose a visual tracking algorithm, robust to many of the difficulties which often occur in real-world scenes. Correspondences of edge-based features are used, to overcome the reliance on the texture of the tracked object and improve invariance to lighting. Furthermore we address long-term stability, enabling the tracker to recover from drift and to provide redetection following object disappearance or occlusion. The two-module principle is similar to the successful state-of-the-art long-term TLD tracker, however our approach extends to cases of low-textured objects. Besides reporting our results on the VOT Challenge dataset, we perform two additional experiments. Firstly, results on short-term sequences show the performance of tracking challenging objects which represent failure cases for competing state-of-the-art approaches. Secondly, long sequences are tracked, including one of almost 30000 frames which to our knowledge is the longest tracking sequence reported to date. This tests the re-detection and drift resistance properties of the tracker. All the results are comparable to the state-of-the-art on sequences with textured objects and superior on non-textured objects. The new annotated sequences are made publicly available.