Recent progress in multiple object tracking (MOT) has shown that a robust similarity score is key to the success of trackers. A good similarity score is expected to reflect multiple cues, e.g. appearance, location, and topology, over a long period of time. However, these cues are heterogeneous, making them hard to be combined in a unified network. As a result, existing methods usually encode them in separate networks or require a complex training approach. In this paper, we present a unified framework for similarity measurement which could simultaneously encode various cues and perform reasoning across both spatial and temporal domains. We also study the feature representation of a tracklet-object pair in depth, showing a proper design of the pair features can well empower the trackers. The resulting approach is named spatial-temporal relation networks (STRN). It runs in a feed-forward way and can be trained in an end-to-end manner. The state-of-the-art accuracy was achieved on all of the MOT15-17 benchmarks using public detection and online settings.
The utilization of location motion features is common as well. Most existing methods assume a prior motion model, such as slow velocity @cite_51 and linear non-linear motion model @cite_49 . For example, the IoU trackers @cite_51 rely on the assumption that objects in consecutive frames are expected to have high overlap, which is often not hold by fast moving objects. Other hard motion models also face the similar problem resulting in limited application. In this paper, instead of using hard location motion priors, we integrate both unary location and motion information into the feature and learn the soft location motion representation from data. Empirical studies on several benchmarks have proved the effectiveness of the learnable location representation.
@cite_51 @cite_49
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Motion models have been proved to be a crucial part in the visual tracking process. In recent trackers, particle filter and sliding windows-based motion models have been widely used. Treating motion models as a sequence prediction problem, we can estimate the motion of objects using their trajectories. Moreover, it is possible to transfer the learned knowledge from annotated trajectories to new objects. Inspired by recent advance in deep learning for visual feature extraction and sequence prediction, we propose a trajectory predictor to learn prior knowledge from annotated trajectories and transfer it to predict the motion of target objects. In this predictor, convolutional neural networks extract the visual features of target objects. Long short-term memory model leverages the annotated trajectory priors as well as sequential visual information, which includes the tracked features and center locations of the target object, to predict the motion. Furthermore, to extend this method to videos in which it is difficult to obtain annotated trajectories, a dynamic weighted motion model that combines the proposed trajectory predictor with a random sampler is proposed. To evaluate the transfer performance of the proposed trajectory predictor, we annotated a real-world vehicle dataset. Experiment results on both this real-world vehicle dataset and an online tracker benchmark dataset indicate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art trackers. Human actions captured in video sequences are threedimensional signals characterizing visual appearance and motion dynamics. To learn action patterns, existing methods adopt Convolutional and or Recurrent Neural Networks (CNNs and RNNs). CNN based methods are effective in learning spatial appearances, but are limited in modeling long-term motion dynamics. RNNs, especially Long Short- Term Memory (LSTM), are able to learn temporal motion dynamics. However, naively applying RNNs to video sequences in a convolutional manner implicitly assumes that motions in videos are stationary across different spatial locations. This assumption is valid for short-term motions but invalid when the duration of the motion is long.,,In this work, we propose Lattice-LSTM (L2STM), which extends LSTM by learning independent hidden state transitions of memory cells for individual spatial locations. This method effectively enhances the ability to model dynamics across time and addresses the non-stationary issue of long-term motion dynamics without significantly increasing the model complexity. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-modal training procedure for training our network. Unlike traditional two-stream architectures which use RGB and optical flow information as input, our two-stream model leverages both modalities to jointly train both input gates and both forget gates in the network rather than treating the two streams as separate entities with no information about the other. We apply this end-to-end system to benchmark datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) of human action recognition. Experiments show that on both datasets, our proposed method outperforms all existing ones that are based on LSTM and or CNNs of similar model complexities. Human actions captured in video sequences are three-dimensional signals characterizing visual appearance and motion dynamics. To learn action patterns, existing methods adopt Convolutional and or Recurrent Neural Networks (CNNs and RNNs). CNN based methods are effective in learning spatial appearances, but are limited in modeling long-term motion dynamics. RNNs, especially Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), are able to learn temporal motion dynamics. However, naively applying RNNs to video sequences in a convolutional manner implicitly assumes that motions in videos are stationary across different spatial locations. This assumption is valid for short-term motions but invalid when the duration of the motion is long. In this work, we propose Lattice-LSTM (L2STM), which extends LSTM by learning independent hidden state transitions of memory cells for individual spatial locations. This method effectively enhances the ability to model dynamics across time and addresses the non-stationary issue of long-term motion dynamics without significantly increasing the model complexity. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-modal training procedure for training our network. Unlike traditional two-stream architectures which use RGB and optical flow information as input, our two-stream model leverages both modalities to jointly train both input gates and both forget gates in the network rather than treating the two streams as separate entities with no information about the other. We apply this end-to-end system to benchmark datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) of human action recognition. Experiments show that on both datasets, our proposed method outperforms all existing ones that are based on LSTM and or CNNs of similar model complexities. This paper presents a target tracking framework for unstructured crowded scenes. Unstructured crowded scenes are defined as those scenes where the motion of a crowd appears to be random with different participants moving in different directions over time. This means each spatial location in such scenes supports more than one, or multi-modal, crowd behavior. The case of tracking in structured crowded scenes, where the crowd moves coherently in a common direction, and the direction of motion does not vary over time, was previously handled in [1]. In this work, we propose to model various crowd behavior (or motion) modalities at different locations of the scene by employing Correlated Topic Model (CTM) of [16]. In our construction, words correspond to low level quantized motion features and topics correspond to crowd behaviors. It is then assumed that motion at each location in an unstructured crowd scene is generated by a set of behavior proportions, where behaviors represent distributions over low-level motion features. This way any one location in the scene may support multiple crowd behavior modalities and can be used as prior information for tracking. Our approach enables us to model a diverse set of unstructured crowd domains, which range from cluttered time-lapse microscopy videos of cell populations in vitro, to footage of crowded sporting events. In this paper we present an approach for segmenting objects in videos taken in complex scenes with multiple and different targets. The method does not make any specific assumptions about the videos and relies on how objects are perceived by humans according to Gestalt laws. Initially, we rapidly generate a coarse foreground segmentation, which provides predictions about motion regions by analyzing how superpixel segmentation changes in consecutive frames. We then exploit these location priors to refine the initial segmentation by optimizing an energy function based on appearance and perceptual organization, only on regions where motion is observed. We evaluated our method on complex and challenging video sequences and it showed significant performance improvements over recent state-of-the-art methods, being also fast enough to be used for “on-the-fly” processing. The goal of this article is to review the state-of-the-art tracking methods, classify them into different categories, and identify new trends. Object tracking, in general, is a challenging problem. Difficulties in tracking objects can arise due to abrupt object motion, changing appearance patterns of both the object and the scene, nonrigid object structures, object-to-object and object-to-scene occlusions, and camera motion. Tracking is usually performed in the context of higher-level applications that require the location and or shape of the object in every frame. Typically, assumptions are made to constrain the tracking problem in the context of a particular application. In this survey, we categorize the tracking methods on the basis of the object and motion representations used, provide detailed descriptions of representative methods in each category, and examine their pros and cons. Moreover, we discuss the important issues related to tracking including the use of appropriate image features, selection of motion models, and detection of objects. We present an approach for object segmentation in videos that combines frame-level object detection with concepts from object tracking and motion segmentation. The approach extracts temporally consistent object tubes based on an off-the-shelf detector. Besides the class label for each tube, this provides a location prior that is independent of motion. For the final video segmentation, we combine this information with motion cues. The method overcomes the typical problems of weakly supervised unsupervised video segmentation, such as scenes with no motion, dominant camera motion, and objects that move as a unit. In contrast to most tracking methods, it provides an accurate, temporally consistent segmentation of each object. We report results on four video segmentation datasets: YouTube Objects, SegTrackv2, egoMotion, and FBMS. In this paper, we propose a novel MoNet model to deeply exploit motion cues for boosting video object segmentation performance from two aspects, i.e., frame representation learning and segmentation refinement. Concretely, MoNet exploits computed motion cue (i.e., optical flow) to reinforce the representation of the target frame by aligning and integrating representations from its neighbors. The new representation provides valuable temporal contexts for segmentation and improves robustness to various common contaminating factors, e.g., motion blur, appearance variation and deformation of video objects. Moreover, MoNet exploits motion inconsistency and transforms such motion cue into foreground background prior to eliminate distraction from confusing instances and noisy regions. By introducing a distance transform layer, MoNet can effectively separate motion-inconstant instances regions and thoroughly refine segmentation results. Integrating the proposed two motion exploitation components with a standard segmentation network, MoNet provides new state-of-the-art performance on three competitive benchmark datasets. We introduce an unsupervised, geodesic distance based, salient video object segmentation method. Unlike traditional methods, our method incorporates saliency as prior for object via the computation of robust geodesic measurement. We consider two discriminative visual features: spatial edges and temporal motion boundaries as indicators of foreground object locations. We first generate framewise spatiotemporal saliency maps using geodesic distance from these indicators. Building on the observation that foreground areas are surrounded by the regions with high spatiotemporal edge values, geodesic distance provides an initial estimation for foreground and background. Then, high-quality saliency results are produced via the geodesic distances to background regions in the subsequent frames. Through the resulting saliency maps, we build global appearance models for foreground and background. By imposing motion continuity, we establish a dynamic location model for each frame. Finally, the spatiotemporal saliency maps, appearance models and dynamic location models are combined into an energy minimization framework to attain both spatially and temporally coherent object segmentation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on benchmark video dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper we study the problem of local motion analysis and apply it to swimming style recognition in broadcast sports video. Local motion analysis is challenging for two reasons: 1) local motion is usually buried in clutters involving complex motion from multiple objects; and 2) the process is more sensitive to noises compared to the recovery of global motion. However, an effective approach to local motion analysis is significant for understanding human activity from image sequences. In this work, we firstly extract the object-induced local motion by utilizing robust motion estimation and salient color. The object motion is accordingly characterized by compensated motion vectors and confidence measurement. Beyond a single image, we attempt to capture the motion periodicity over the local motion sequence. For each period, we locate a so-called salient frame within which we derive a compact representation to distinctly characterize an image sequence with repeated actions. Finally, we employ a hierarchical classifier to distinguish local motion based on periodicity and salient frames. Promising results have been achieved on swimming style recognition in broadcast sports video. We present a novel variational approach for segmenting the image plane into a set of regions of parametric motion on the basis of two consecutive frames from an image sequence. Our model is based on a conditional probability for the spatio-temporal image gradient, given a particular velocity model, and on a geometric prior on the estimated motion field favoring motion boundaries of minimal length. Exploiting the Bayesian framework, we derive a cost functional which depends on parametric motion models for each of a set of regions and on the boundary separating these regions. The resulting functional can be interpreted as an extension of the Mumford-Shah functional from intensity segmentation to motion segmentation. In contrast to most alternative approaches, the problems of segmentation and motion estimation are jointly solved by continuous minimization of a single functional. Minimizing this functional with respect to its dynamic variables results in an eigenvalue problem for the motion parameters and in a gradient descent evolution for the motion discontinuity set. We propose two different representations of this motion boundary: an explicit spline-based implementation which can be applied to the motion-based tracking of a single moving object, and an implicit multiphase level set implementation which allows for the segmentation of an arbitrary number of multiply connected moving objects. Numerical results both for simulated ground truth experiments and for real-world sequences demonstrate the capacity of our approach to segment objects based exclusively on their relative motion. The problem of motion estimation and restoration of objects in a blurred video sequence is addressed in this paper. Fast movement of the objects, together with the aperture time of the camera, result in a motion-blurred image. The direct velocity estimation from this blurred video is inaccurate. On the other hand, an accurate estimation of the velocity of the moving objects is critical for restoration of motion-blurred video. Therefore, restoration needs accurate motion estimation and vice versa, and a joint process is called for. To address this problem we derive a novel model of the blurring process and propose a Mumford-Shah type of variational framework, acting on consecutive frames, for joint object deblurring and velocity estimation. The proposed procedure distinguishes between the moving object and the background and is accurate also close to the boundary of the moving object. Experimental results both on simulated and real data show the importance of this joint estimation and its superior performance when compared to the independent estimation of motion and restoration. For robots to work effectively with humans, they must learn and recognize activities that humans perform. We enable a robot to learn a library of activities from user demonstrations and use it to recognize an action performed by an operator in real time. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a novel probabilistic flow tube representation that can intuitively capture a wide range of motions and can be used to support compliant execution; (2) a method to identify the relevant features of a motion, and ensure that the learned representation preserves these features in new and unforeseen situations; (3) a fast incremental algorithm for recognizing user-performed motions using this representation. Our approach provides several capabilities beyond those of existing algorithms. First, we leverage temporal information to model motions that may exhibit non-Markovian characteristics. Second, our approach can identify parameters of a motion not explicitly specified by the user. Third, we model hybrid continuous and discrete motions in a unified representation that avoids abstracting out the continuous details of the data. Experimental results show a 49 improvement over prior art in recognition rate for varying environments, and a 24 improvement for a static environment, while maintaining average computing times for incremental recognition of less than half of human reaction time. We also demonstrate motion learning and recognition capabilities on real-world robot platforms. We propose an object detection system that uses the locations of tracked low-level feature points as input, and produces a set of independent coherent motion regions as output. As an object moves, tracked feature points on it span a coherent 3D region in the space-time volume defined by the video. In the case of multi-object motion, many possible coherent motion regions can be constructed around the set of all feature point tracks. Our approach is to identify all possible coherent motion regions, and extract the subset that maximizes an overall likelihood function while assigning each point track to at most one motion region. We solve the problem of finding the best set of coherent motion regions with a simple greedy algorithm, and show that our approach produces semantically correct detections and counts of similar objects moving through crowded scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel real-time tracker based on color, texture and motion information. RGB color histogram and correlogram (autocorrelogram) are exploited as color cues and texture properties are represented by local binary patterns (LBP). Object's motion is taken into account through location and trajectory. After extraction, these features are used to build a unifying distance measure. The measure is utilized in tracking and in the classification event, in which an object is leaving a group. The initial object detection is done by a texture-based background subtraction algorithm. The experiments on indoor and outdoor surveillance videos show that a unified system works better than the versions based on single features. It also copes well with low illumination conditions and low frame rates which are common in large scale surveillance systems. The structure-from-motion problem has been extensively studied in the field of computer vision. Yet, the bulk of the existing work assumes that the scene contains only a single moving object. The more realistic case where an unknown number of objects move in the scene has received little attention, especially for its theoretical treatment. In this paper we present a new method for separating and recovering the motion and shape of multiple independently moving objects in a sequence of images. The method does not require prior knowledge of the number of objects, nor is dependent on any grouping of features into an object at the image level. For this purpose, we introduce a mathematical construct of object shapes, called the shape interaction matrix, which is invariant to both the object motions and the selection of coordinate systems. This invariant structure is computable solely from the observed trajectories of image features without grouping them into individual objects. Once the matrix is computed, it allows for segmenting features into objects by the process of transforming it into a canonical form, as well as recovering the shape and motion of each object. The theory works under a broad set of projection models (scaled orthography, paraperspective and affine) but they must be linear, so it excludes projective “cameras”. Tracking objects like a basketball from a monocular view is challenging due to its small size, potential to move at high velocities as well as the high frequency of occlusion. However, humans with a deep knowledge of a game like basketball can predict with high accuracy the location of the ball even without seeing it due to the location and motion of nearby objects, as well as information of where it was last seen. Learning from tracking data is problematic however, due to the high variance in player locations. In this paper, we show that by simply "permuting" the multi-agent data we obtain a compact role-ordered feature which accurately predict the ball owner. We also show that our formulation can incorporate other information sources such as a vision-based ball detector to improve prediction accuracy. In this paper, we study the problem of segmenting tracked feature point trajectories of multiple moving objects in an image sequence. Using the affine camera model, this problem can be cast as the problem of segmenting samples drawn from multiple linear subspaces. In practice, due to limitations of the tracker, occlusions, and the presence of nonrigid objects in the scene, the obtained motion trajectories may contain grossly mistracked features, missing entries, or corrupted entries. In this paper, we develop a robust subspace separation scheme that deals with these practical issues in a unified mathematical framework. Our methods draw strong connections between lossy compression, rank minimization, and sparse representation. We test our methods extensively on the Hopkins155 motion segmentation database and other motion sequences with outliers and missing data. We compare the performance of our methods to state-of-the-art motion segmentation methods based on expectation-maximization and spectral clustering. For data without outliers or missing information, the results of our methods are on par with the state-of-the-art results and, in many cases, exceed them. In addition, our methods give surprisingly good performance in the presence of the three types of pathological trajectories mentioned above. All code and results are publicly available at http: perception.csl.uiuc.edu coding motion . In this paper we present a time-efficient estimation framework for camera-based pedestrian tracking from a moving host car using a monocular camera. An image processing system processes the camera output to find the location of objects of interest in each frame. The position and sensor information about the host translation and rotation are passed to a tracking module. The module uses the position of the detected objectpsilas foot point as measurement input and connects them over time to estimate the movement of the objects of interest in order to reduce noise and single frame failures in the detection process. We have developed a new method to estimate the target movement which takes into account the host movement and allows to exploit prior information about the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. The basic idea is to assume that host and target movements can be modelled as 2-dimensional movements on a flat ground-plane. Our developed motion model is based on this assumption and includes host motion as well as the target ego motion. A measurement is modelled as a perspective projection of a point on the ground-plane to the image plane. The motion and the measurement model are combined by an unscented Kalman filter. This filter is relatively new and has not been applied for pedestrian tracking before. Finally, we present a new logical initialization strategy for the selected filter, a part that is left out by most other publications. First results indicate that our approach gives good tracking results and allows to track pedestrians from a moving host in real time. How to leverage the temporal dimension is a key question in video analysis. Recent work suggests an efficient approach to video feature learning, namely, factorizing 3D convolutions into separate components respectively for spatial and temporal convolutions. The temporal convolution, however, comes with an implicit assumption – the feature maps across time steps are well aligned so that the features at the same locations can be aggregated. This assumption may be overly strong in practical applications, especially in action recognition where the motion of people or objects is a crucial aspect. In this work, we propose a new CNN architecture TrajectoryNet, which incorporates trajectory convolution, a new operation for integrating features along the temporal dimension, to replace the standard temporal convolution. This operation explicitly takes into account the location changes caused by deformation or motion, allowing the visual features to be aggregated along the the motion paths. On two very large-scale action recognition datasets, namely, Something-Something and Kinetics, the proposed network architecture achieves notable improvement over strong baselines.