This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with instances of the same object class across different videos, a role normally left to supervisory information in the form of class labels in conventional image and video understanding methods. Indeed, as demonstrated by our experiments, our method can handle video collections featuring multiple object classes, and substantially outperforms the state of the art in colocalization, even though it tackles a broader problem with much less supervision.
Our approach combines object discovery and tracking. The discovery part establishes correspondences between frames across videos to detect object candidates. Similar approaches have been proposed for salient region detection @cite_31 , image cosegmentation @cite_34 @cite_28 , and image colocalization @cite_5 . Conventional object tracking methods @cite_8 usually require annotations for at least one frame @cite_14 @cite_11 @cite_7 , or object detectors trained for target classes in a supervised manner @cite_20 @cite_10 @cite_12 . Our method does not require such supervision and instead alternates discovery and tracking of object candidates.
@cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_34 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_20 @cite_11
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Object tracking is one of the most important components in numerous applications of computer vision. While much progress has been made in recent years with efforts on sharing code and datasets, it is of great importance to develop a library and benchmark to gauge the state of the art. After briefly reviewing recent advances of online object tracking, we carry out large scale experiments with various evaluation criteria to understand how these algorithms perform. The test image sequences are annotated with different attributes for performance evaluation and analysis. By analyzing quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field. We propose a novel offline tracking algorithm based on model-averaged posterior estimation through patch matching across frames. Contrary to existing online and offline tracking methods, our algorithm is not based on temporally-ordered estimates of target state but attempts to select easy-to-track frames first out of the remaining ones without exploiting temporal coherency of target. The posterior of the selected frame is estimated by propagating densities from the already tracked frames in a recursive manner. The density propagation across frames is implemented by an efficient patch matching technique, which is useful for our algorithm since it does not require motion smoothness assumption. Also, we present a hierarchical approach, where a small set of key frames are tracked first and non-key frames are handled by local key frames. Our tracking algorithm is conceptually well-suited for the sequences with abrupt motion, shot changes, and occlusion. We compare our tracking algorithm with existing techniques in real videos with such challenges and illustrate its superior performance qualitatively and quantitatively. 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. Joint segmentation of image sets has great importance for object recognition, image classification, and image retrieval. In this paper, we aim to jointly segment a set of images starting from a small number of labeled images or none at all. To allow the images to share segmentation information with each other, we build a network that contains segmented as well as unsegmented images, and extract functional maps between connected image pairs based on image appearance features. These functional maps act as general property transporters between the images and, in particular, are used to transfer segmentations. We define and operate in a reduced functional space optimized so that the functional maps approximately satisfy cycle-consistency under composition in the network. A joint optimization framework is proposed to simultaneously generate all segmentation functions over the images so that they both align with local segmentation cues in each particular image, and agree with each other under network transportation. This formulation allows us to extract segmentations even with no training data, but can also exploit such data when available. The collective effect of the joint processing using functional maps leads to accurate information sharing among images and yields superior segmentation results, as shown on the iCoseg, MSRC, and PASCAL data sets. This paper addresses unsupervised discovery and localization of dominant objects from a noisy image collection with multiple object classes. The setting of this problem is fully unsupervised, without even image-level annotations or any assumption of a single dominant class. This is far more general than typical colocalization, cosegmentation, or weakly-supervised localization tasks. We tackle the discovery and localization problem using a part-based region matching approach: We use off-the-shelf region proposals to form a set of candidate bounding boxes for objects and object parts. These regions are efficiently matched across images using a probabilistic Hough transform that evaluates the confidence for each candidate correspondence considering both appearance and spatial consistency. Dominant objects are discovered and localized by comparing the scores of candidate regions and selecting those that stand out over other regions containing them. Extensive experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the current state of the art in colocalization, and achieves robust object discovery in challenging mixed-class datasets. This paper proposes a fast and scalable alternating optimization technique to detect regions of interest (ROIs) in cluttered Web images without labels. The proposed approach discovers highly probable regions of object instances by iteratively repeating the following two functions: (1) choose the exemplar set (i.e. a small number of highly ranked reference ROIs) across the dataset and (2) refine the ROIs of each image with respect to the exemplar set. These two subproblems are formulated as ranking in two different similarity networks of ROI hypotheses by link analysis. The experiments with the PASCAL 06 dataset show that our unsupervised localization performance is better than one of state-of-the-art techniques and comparable to supervised methods. Also, we test the scalability of our approach with five objects in Flickr dataset consisting of more than 200K images. Joint segmentation of image sets is a challenging problem, especially when there are multiple objects with variable appearance shared among the images in the collection and the set of objects present in each particular image is itself varying and unknown. In this paper, we present a novel method to jointly segment a set of images containing objects from multiple classes. We first establish consistent functional maps across the input images, and introduce a formulation that explicitly models partial similarity across images instead of global consistency. Given the optimized maps between pairs of images, multiple groups of consistent segmentation functions are found such that they align with segmentation cues in the images, agree with the functional maps, and are mutually exclusive. The proposed fully unsupervised approach exhibits a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods, as shown on the co-segmentation data sets MSRC, Flickr, and PASCAL. The majority of existing pedestrian trackers concentrate on maintaining the identities of targets, however systems for remote biometric analysis or activity recognition in surveillance video often require stable bounding-boxes around pedestrians rather than approximate locations. We present a multi-target tracking system that is designed specifically for the provision of stable and accurate head location estimates. By performing data association over a sliding window of frames, we are able to correct many data association errors and fill in gaps where observations are missed. The approach is multi-threaded and combines asynchronous HOG detections with simultaneous KLT tracking and Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo Data Association (MCM-CDA) to provide guaranteed real-time tracking in high definition video. Where previous approaches have used ad-hoc models for data association, we use a more principled approach based on a Minimal Description Length (MDL) objective which accurately models the affinity between observations. We demonstrate by qualitative and quantitative evaluation that the system is capable of providing precise location estimates for large crowds of pedestrians in real-time. To facilitate future performance comparisons, we make a new dataset with hand annotated ground truth head locations publicly available. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically detecting and tracking a variable number of persons in complex scenes using a monocular, potentially moving, uncalibrated camera. We propose a novel approach for multiperson tracking-by-detection in a particle filtering framework. In addition to final high-confidence detections, our algorithm uses the continuous confidence of pedestrian detectors and online-trained, instance-specific classifiers as a graded observation model. Thus, generic object category knowledge is complemented by instance-specific information. The main contribution of this paper is to explore how these unreliable information sources can be used for robust multiperson tracking. The algorithm detects and tracks a large number of dynamically moving people in complex scenes with occlusions, does not rely on background modeling, requires no camera or ground plane calibration, and only makes use of information from the past. Hence, it imposes very few restrictions and is suitable for online applications. Our experiments show that the method yields good tracking performance in a large variety of highly dynamic scenarios, such as typical surveillance videos, webcam footage, or sports sequences. We demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other methods that rely on additional information. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of different algorithm components on the robustness. Adaptive tracking-by-detection methods are widely used in computer vision for tracking arbitrary objects. Current approaches treat the tracking problem as a classification task and use online learning techniques to update the object model. However, for these updates to happen one needs to convert the estimated object position into a set of labelled training examples, and it is not clear how best to perform this intermediate step. Furthermore, the objective for the classifier (label prediction) is not explicitly coupled to the objective for the tracker (accurate estimation of object position). In this paper, we present a framework for adaptive visual object tracking based on structured output prediction. By explicitly allowing the output space to express the needs of the tracker, we are able to avoid the need for an intermediate classification step. Our method uses a kernelized structured output support vector machine (SVM), which is learned online to provide adaptive tracking. To allow for real-time application, we introduce a budgeting mechanism which prevents the unbounded growth in the number of support vectors which would otherwise occur during tracking. Experimentally, we show that our algorithm is able to outperform state-of-the-art trackers on various benchmark videos. Additionally, we show that we can easily incorporate additional features and kernels into our framework, which results in increased performance.