Tracking many vehicles in wide coverage aerial imagery is crucial for understanding events in a large field of view. Most approaches aim to associate detections from frame differencing into tracks. However, slow or stopped vehicles result in long-term missing detections and further cause tracking discontinuities. Relying merely on appearance clue to recover missing detections is difficult as targets are extremely small and in grayscale. In this paper, we address the limitations of detection association methods by coupling it with a local context tracker (LCT), which does not rely on motion detections. On one hand, our LCT learns neighboring spatial relation and tracks each target in consecutive frames using graph optimization. It takes the advantage of context constraints to avoid drifting to nearby targets. We generate hypotheses from sparse and dense flow efficiently to keep solutions tractable. On the other hand, we use detection association strategy to extract short tracks in batch processing. We explicitly handle merged detections by generating additional hypotheses from them. Our evaluation on wide area aerial imagery sequences shows significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Most WAMI tracking approaches focus on associating noisy motion detections into tracks. Motion detections are typically acquired by applying frame differencing methods to stabilized imagery. Perera al @cite_23 propose to first generate short tracks using nearest-neighbor strategy and then handle split-then-merge situations in track linking. Reilly al @cite_47 formulate the data association problem in Hungarian algorithm. Prokaj al @cite_19 extract tracklet from detections by Bayesian network. Shi al @cite_0 associate motion detections by rank-1 tensor optimization. Keck al @cite_35 provide a real-time implementation for tracking based on multiple hypothesis tracking. The object-centric association method is proposed in @cite_21 to relax the one-to-one matching assumption for motion detections. Additional context constraints are used to alleviate track intersection. Chen and Medioni @cite_26 extract tracklets by finding the longest path through detection trees. These above trackers mainly rely on motion detections. Therefore, they cannot recover long-term missing detections from slow or stopped vehicles.
@cite_35 @cite_26 @cite_21 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_47
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Live wide-area persistent surveillance (WAPS) systems must provide effective multi-target tracking on downlinked video streams in real-time. This paper presents the first published aerial tracking system that is documented to process over 100 megapixels per second. The implementation addresses the challenges with the mosaicked, low-resolution, grayscale NITF imagery provided by most currently fielded WAPS platforms and the flexible computation architecture required to provide real-time performance. This paper also provides ground-truth for repeatable evaluation of wide-area persistent surveillance on a 2009 dataset collected by AFRL [1] that is available to the public as well as a quantitative analysis of this real-time implementation. To our knowledge, this is the only publication that (1) provides details of a real-time implementation for detection and tracking in (2) mosaicked, composed imagery from a fielded WAPS sensor, and (3) provides annotation data and quantitative analysis for repeatable WAPS tracking experimentation in the computer vision community. We propose a novel approach to track multiple targets with weak appearance in low frame rate wide area aerial videos. In real world scenarios, non-linear motion such as sharp turns after slowing down or U-shape trajectories occur. Performing accurate matching without introducing undesired trajectories is very challenging. To tackle various motion patterns, we sequentially optimizing an objective function and propagating motion information at each time step in a sliding temporal window. We show how to exploit an optimal short track (tracklet) for each detection in the first frame of each window using dynamic programming. Tracklets obtained in the window are then associated with existing tracks iteratively to form final tracks. We reduce false alarms in background subtraction motion detection with the aid of optical flow. Our system is tested on two challenging datasets. The quantitative evaluation on a long annotated aerial video sequence shows that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art detection and tracking methods in all common axes of evaluation metrics. 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. In this paper we formulate multi-target tracking (MTT) as a rank-1 tensor approximation problem and propose an l1 norm tensor power iteration solution. In particular, a high order tensor is constructed based on trajectories in the time window, with each tensor element as the affinity of the corresponding trajectory candidate. The local assignment variables are the l1 normalized vectors, which are used to approximate the rank-1 tensor. Our approach provides a flexible and effective formulation where both pairwise and high-order association energies can be used expediently. We also show the close relation between our formulation and the multi-dimensional assignment (MDA) model. To solve the optimization in the rank-1 tensor approximation, we propose an algorithm that iteratively powers the intermediate solution followed by an l1 normalization. Aside from effectively capturing high-order motion information, the proposed solver runs efficiently with proved convergence. The experimental validations are conducted on two challenging datasets and our method demonstrates promising performances on both. 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. A fundamental requirement for effective automated analysis of object behavior and interactions in video is that each object must be consistently identified over time. This is difficult when the objects are often occluded for long periods: nearly all tracking algorithms will terminate a track with loss of identity on a long gap. The problem is further confounded by objects in close proximity, tracking failures due to shadows, etc. Recently, some work has been done to address these issues using higher level reasoning, by linking tracks from multiple objects over long gaps. However, these efforts have assumed a one-to-one correspondence between tracks on either side of the gap. This is often not true in real scenarios of interest, where the objects are closely spaced and dynamically occlude each other, causing trackers to merge objects into single tracks. In this paper, we show how to efficiently handle splitting and merging during track linking. Moreover, we show that we can maintain the identities of objects that merge together and subsequently split. This enables the identity of objects to be maintained throughout long sequences with difficult conditions. We demonstrate our approach on a highly challenging, oblique-view video sequence of dense traffic of a highway interchange. We successfully track the large majority of the hundreds of moving vehicles in the scene, many in close proximity, through long occlusions and shadows. In this paper, we tackle the problem of object detection and tracking in a new and challenging domain of wide area surveillance. This problem poses several challenges: large camera motion, strong parallax, large number of moving objects, small number of pixels on target, single channel data and low framerate of video. We propose a method that overcomes these challenges and evaluate it on CLIF dataset. We use median background modeling which requires few frames to obtain a workable model. We remove false detections due to parallax and registration errors using gradient information of the background image. In order to keep complexity of the tracking problem manageable, we divide the scene into grid cells, solve the tracking problem optimally within each cell using bipartite graph matching and then link tracks across cells. Besides tractability, grid cells allow us to define a set of local scene constraints such as road orientation and object context. We use these constraints as part of cost function to solve the tracking problem which allows us to track fast-moving objects in low framerate videos. In addition to that, we manually generated groundtruth for four sequences and performed quantitative evaluation of the proposed algorithm.