Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel approach for exploiting structural relations to track multiple objects that may undergo long-term occlusion and abrupt motion. We use a model-free approach that relies only on annotations given in the first frame of the video to track all the objects online, i.e. without knowledge from future frames. We initialize a probabilistic Attributed Relational Graph (ARG) from the first frame, which is incrementally updated along the video. Instead of using the structural information only to evaluate the scene, the proposed approach considers it to generate new tracking hypotheses. In this way, our method is capable of generating relevant object candidates that are used to improve or recover the track of lost objects. The proposed method is evaluated on several videos of table tennis, volleyball, and on the ACASVA dataset. The results show that our approach is very robust, flexible and able to outperform other state-of-the-art methods in sports videos that present structural patterns.
Another important issue that must be dealt with during tracking is abrupt motion. Perhaps, the simplest way to deal with it is by generating some additional target location hypotheses around the previous location to try to cover a broader region, as explored in @cite_31 . Another proposal is to solve the same problem using spatial position information for finding better candidates @cite_3 @cite_21 . This is done by dividing the image into several smaller regions and using the information obtained from the density of states of each one to find new locations. More recently, Su al @cite_6 propose relying on visual saliency information to guide the tracking and restore the target. It is important to note that, although tracking-by-detection methods should be able to deal with abrupt motion, most of them do not behave well in this situation because their association function usually enforces the temporal stability constraint. As previously mentioned, we use a different approach that relies on the structural relations between the objects to find the most likely new locations of a lost target.
@cite_31 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_3
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Abrupt motion is a significant challenge that commonly causes traditional tracking methods to fail. This paper presents an improved visual saliency model and integrates it to a particle filter tracker to solve this problem. Once the target is lost, our algorithm recovers tracking by detecting the target region from salient regions, which are obtained in the saliency map of current frame. In addition, to strengthen the saliency of target region, the target model is used as a prior knowledge to calculate a weight set which is utilized to construct our improved saliency map adaptively. Furthermore, we adopt the covariance descriptor as the appearance model to describe the object more accurately. Compared with several other tracking algorithms, the experimental results demonstrate that our method is more robust in dealing with various types of abrupt motion scenarios. A method for multiface tracking in low frame rate egocentric videos is proposed (eBoT).eBoT generates a tracklet for each detected face and groups similar tracklets.eBoT extracts a prototype for each group of tracklets and estimates its confidence.eBoT is robust to drastic changes in location and appearance of faces.eBoT is robust to partial and severe occlusions and is able to localize them. Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. An algorithm for tracking multiple targets in a cluttered enviroment is developed. The algorithm is capable of initiating tracks, accounting for false or missing reports, and processing sets of dependent reports. As each measurement is received, probabilities are calculated for the hypotheses that the measurement came from previously known targets in a target file, or from a new target, or that the measurement is false. Target states are estimated from each such data-association hypothesis using a Kalman filter. As more measurements are received, the probabilities of joint hypotheses are calculated recursively using all available information such as density of unknown targets, density of false targets, probability of detection, and location uncertainty. This branching technique allows correlation of a measurement with its source based on subsequent, as well as previous, data. To keep the number of hypotheses reasonable, unlikely hypotheses are eliminated and hypotheses with similar target estimates are combined. To minimize computational requirements, the entire set of targets and measurements is divided into clusters that are solved independently. In an illustrative example of aircraft tracking, the algorithm successfully tracks targets over a wide range of conditions. We present a system to detect and track moving objects from an airborne platform. Given a global map, such as a satellite image, our approach can locate and track the targets in geo-coordinates, namely longitude and latitude obtained from geo-registration. A motion model in geo-coordinates is more physically meaningful than the one in image coordinates. We propose to use a two-step geo-registration approach to stitch images acquired by satellite and UAV cameras. Mutual information is used to find correspondences between these two very different modalities. After motion segmentation and geo-registration, tracking is performed in a hierarchical manner: at the temporally local level, moving image blobs extracted by motion segmentation are associated into tracklets; at the global level, tracklets are linked by their appearance and spatio-temporal consistency on the global map. To achieve efficient time performance, graphics processing unit techniques are applied in the geo-registration and motion detection modules, which are the bottleneck of the whole system. Experiments show that our method can efficiently deal with long term occlusion and segmented tracks even when targets fall out the field of view. 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 propose a novel tracking algorithm based on the Wang-Landau Monte Carlo sampling method which efficiently deals with the abrupt motions. Abrupt motions could cause conventional tracking methods to fail since they violate the motion smoothness constraint. To address this problem, we introduce the Wang-Landau algorithm that has been recently proposed in statistical physics, and integrate this algorithm into the Markov Chain Monte Carlo based tracking method. Our tracking method alleviates the motion smoothness constraint utilizing both the likelihood term and the density of states term, which is estimated by the Wang-Landau algorithm. The likelihood term helps to improve the accuracy in tracking smooth motions, while the density of states term captures abrupt motions robustly. Experimental results reveal that our approach efficiently samples the object's states even in a whole state space without loss of time. Therefore, it tracks the object of which motion is drastically changing, accurately and robustly. We present a novel tracking method for surveillance videos where the object and camera motion could be irregular. The tracker is mainly based on the mechanism of motion saliency detection, where regions of interest are detected according to the motion saliency of the moving objects. Without estimating global and local motion explicitly, we generate motion saliency by using the rank deficiency of gray scale gradient tensors within the local region neighborhoods of the image. In addition, multiple spatial features of targets are integrated in the system to assist the region-based tracking task. Experiment results on many videos suggest that the proposed method tracks moving targets efficiently even in videos with unstable cameras. In this paper, we present a simple yet fast and robust algorithm which exploits the dense spatio-temporal context for visual tracking. Our approach formulates the spatio-temporal relationships between the object of interest and its locally dense contexts in a Bayesian framework, which models the statistical correlation between the simple low-level features (i.e., image intensity and position) from the target and its surrounding regions. The tracking problem is then posed by computing a confidence map which takes into account the prior information of the target location and thereby alleviates target location ambiguity effectively. We further propose a novel explicit scale adaptation scheme, which is able to deal with target scale variations efficiently and effectively. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is adopted for fast learning and detection in this work, which only needs 4 FFT operations. Implemented in MATLAB without code optimization, the proposed tracker runs at 350 frames per second on an i7 machine. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness. When tracking small moving objects, primates use smooth pursuit eye movements to keep a target in the center of the field of view. In this paper, we propose the Smooth Pursuit tracking algorithm, which uses three kinds of saliency maps to perform online target tracking: appearance, location, and motion. In addition to tracking single targets, our method can track multiple targets with little additional overhead. The appearance saliency map uses deep convolutional neural network features along with gnostic fields, a brain-inspired model for object recognition. The location saliency map predicts where the object will move next. Finally, the motion saliency map indicates which objects are moving in the scene. We combine all three saliency maps into a smooth pursuit map, which is used to generate bounding boxes for tracked objects. We evaluate our algorithm and others from the literature on a vehicle tracking task. Our approach achieves the best overall performance, including being the only method we tested capable of handling long-term occlusions. We propose a framework for general multiple target tracking, where the input is a set of candidate regions in each frame, as obtained from a state of the art background learning, and the goal is to recover trajectories of targets over time from noisy observations. Due to occlusions by targets and static objects, noisy segmentation and false alarms, one foreground region may not correspond to one target faithfully. Therefore the one-to-one assumption used in most data association algorithm is not always satisfied. Our method overcomes the one-to-one assumption by formulating the visual tracking problem in terms of finding the best spatial and temporal association of observations, which maximizes the consistency of both motion and appearance of trajectories. To avoid enumerating all possible solutions, we take a data driven Markov chain Monte Carlo (DD-MCMC) approach to sample the solution space efficiently. The sampling is driven by an informed proposal scheme controlled by a joint probability model combining motion and appearance. To make sure the Markov chain to converge to a desired distribution, we propose an automatic approach to determine the parameters in the target distribution. Comparative experiments with quantitative evaluations are provided. We propose an online multiple object tracking algorithm that exploits optical flow and convolutional features to handle noisy detections as well as frequent occlusion. To achieve robust tracking, we develop a data association method that deals with tracking scenarios of increasing difficulty. For easy scenarios, we use motion affinity to associate detections with objects. For ambiguous situations, we propose to use an appearance model based on convolutional features and correlation filters to complement template matching methods. For difficult cases where objects are under heavy occlusion, we carry out occlusion analysis, which exploits the relationship between targets and occluders to predict potential object locations. To deal with noisy detections, false positives are detected and removed on both raw detection and tracklet levels, while missing and inaccurate detections are recovered or corrected via short-term tracking. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed online algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Robust tracking of abrupt motion is a challenging task in computer vision due to the large motion uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) based tracking scheme for abrupt motion problem in Bayesian filtering framework. In our tracking scheme, the particle weight is dynamically estimated by learning the density of states in simulations, and thus the local-trap problem suffered by the conventional MCMC sampling-based methods could be essentially avoided. In addition, we design an adaptive SAMC sampling method to further speed up the sampling process for tracking of abrupt motion. It combines the SAMC sampling and a density grid based statistical predictive model, to give a data-mining mode embedded global sampling scheme. It is computationally efficient and effective in dealing with abrupt motion difficulties. We compare it with alternative tracking methods. Extensive experimental results showed the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm in dealing with various types of abrupt motions. We propose a novel motion model, SteadyFlow, to represent the motion between neighboring video frames for stabilization. A SteadyFlow is a specific optical flow by enforcing strong spatial coherence, such that smoothing feature trajectories can be replaced by smoothing pixel profiles, which are motion vectors collected at the same pixel location in the SteadyFlow over time. In this way, we can avoid brittle feature tracking in a video stabilization system. Besides, SteadyFlow is a more general 2D motion model which can deal with spatially-variant motion. We initialize the SteadyFlow by optical flow and then discard discontinuous motions by a spatial-temporal analysis and fill in missing regions by motion completion. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our stabilization on real-world challenging videos. In this work, we propose a tracker that differs from most existing multi-target trackers in two major ways. First, our tracker does not rely on a pre-trained object detector to get the initial object hypotheses. Second, our tracker's final output is the fine contours of the targets rather than traditional bounding boxes. Therefore, our tracker simultaneously solves three main problems: detection, data association and segmentation. This is especially important because the output of each of those three problems are highly correlated and the solution of one can greatly help improve the others. The proposed algorithm consists of two main components: structured learning and Lagrange dual decomposition. Our structured learning based tracker learns a model for each target and infers the best locations of all targets simultaneously in a video clip. The inference of our structured learning is achieved through a new Target Identity-aware Network Flow (TINF), where each node in the network encodes the probability of each target identity belonging to that node. The probabilities are obtained by training target specific models using a global structured learning technique. This is followed by proposed Lagrangian relaxation optimization to find the high quality solution to the network. This forms the first component of our tracker. The second component is Lagrange dual decomposition, which combines the structured learning tracker with a segmentation algorithm. For segmentation, multi-label Conditional Random Field (CRF) is applied to a superpixel based spatio-temporal graph in a segment of video, in order to assign background or target labels to every superpixel. We show how the multi-label CRF is combined with the structured learning tracker through our dual decomposition formulation. This leads to more accurate segmentation results and also helps better resolve typical difficulties in multiple target tracking, such as occlusion handling, ID-switch and track drifting. The experiments on diverse and challenging sequences show that our method achieves superior results compared to competitive approaches for detection, multiple target tracking as well as segmentation. We introduce an online learning approach for multitarget tracking. Detection responses are gradually associated into tracklets in multiple levels to produce final tracks. Unlike most previous approaches which only focus on producing discriminative motion and appearance models for all targets, we further consider discriminative features for distinguishing difficult pairs of targets. The tracking problem is formulated using an online learned CRF model, and is transformed into an energy minimization problem. The energy functions include a set of unary functions that are based on motion and appearance models for discriminating all targets, as well as a set of pairwise functions that are based on models for differentiating corresponding pairs of tracklets. The online CRF approach is more powerful at distinguishing spatially close targets with similar appearances, as well as in dealing with camera motions. An efficient algorithm is introduced for finding an association with low energy cost. We evaluate our approach on three public data sets, and show significant improvements compared with several state-of-art methods. Visual object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo significant appearance changes caused by deformation, abrupt motion, background clutter and occlusion. In this paper, we exploit features extracted from deep convolutional neural networks trained on object recognition datasets to improve tracking accuracy and robustness. The outputs of the last convolutional layers encode the semantic information of targets and such representations are robust to significant appearance variations. However, their spatial resolution is too coarse to precisely localize targets. In contrast, earlier convolutional layers provide more precise localization but are less invariant to appearance changes. We interpret the hierarchies of convolutional layers as a nonlinear counterpart of an image pyramid representation and exploit these multiple levels of abstraction for visual tracking. Specifically, we adaptively learn correlation filters on each convolutional layer to encode the target appearance. We hierarchically infer the maximum response of each layer to locate targets. Extensive experimental results on a largescale benchmark dataset show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Object tracking typically relies on a dynamic model to predict the object's location from its past trajectory. In crowded scenarios a strong dynamic model is particularly important, because more accurate predictions allow for smaller search regions, which greatly simplifies data association. Traditional dynamic models predict the location for each target solely based on its own history, without taking into account the remaining scene objects. Collisions are resolved only when they happen. Such an approach ignores important aspects of human behavior: people are driven by their future destination, take into account their environment, anticipate collisions, and adjust their trajectories at an early stage in order to avoid them. In this work, we introduce a model of dynamic social behavior, inspired by models developed for crowd simulation. The model is trained with videos recorded from birds-eye view at busy locations, and applied as a motion model for multi-people tracking from a vehicle-mounted camera. Experiments on real sequences show that accounting for social interactions and scene knowledge improves tracking performance, especially during occlusions. A major reason leading to tracking failure is the spatial distractions that exhibit similar visual appearances as the target, because they also generate good matches to the target and thus distract the tracker. It is in general very difficult to handle this situation. In a selective attention tracking paradigm, this paper advocates a new approach of discriminative spatial attention that identifies some special regions on the target, called attentional regions (ARs). The ARs show strong discriminative power in their discriminative domains where they do not observe similar things. This paper presents an efficient two-stage method that divides the discriminative domain into a local and a semi-local one. In the local domain, the visual appearance of an attentional region is locally linearized and its discriminative power is closely related to the property of the associated linear manifold, so that a gradient-based search is designed to locate the set of local ARs. Based on that, the set of semi-local ARs are identified through an efficient branch-and-bound procedure that guarantees the optimality. Extensive experiments show that such discriminative spatial attention leads to superior performances in many challenging target tracking tasks. 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 show that multiple object tracking (MOT) can be formulated in a framework, where the detection and data-association are performed simultaneously. Our method allows us to overcome the confinements of data association based MOT approaches; where the performance is dependent on the object detection results provided at input level. At the core of our method lies structured learning which learns a model for each target and infers the best location of all targets simultaneously in a video clip. The inference of our structured learning is done through a new Target Identity-aware Network Flow (TINF), where each node in the network encodes the probability of each target identity belonging to that node. The proposed Lagrangian relaxation optimization finds the high quality solution to the network. During optimization a soft spatial constraint is enforced between the nodes of the graph which helps reducing the ambiguity caused by nearby targets with similar appearance in crowded scenarios. We show that automatically detecting and tracking targets in a single framework can help resolve the ambiguities due to frequent occlusion and heavy articulation of targets. Our experiments involve challenging yet distinct datasets and show that our method can achieve results better than the state-of-art.