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.
Using context information is an appealing strategy for tracking against distracters and occlusion. This concept has been applied on single target tracking @cite_20 @cite_11 @cite_14 . Recently, @cite_34 incorporates spatial constraints with tracking-by-detection. Nevertheless, these trackers require accurate annotation for initialization. It is not trivial to directly apply these approaches in WAMI, where the number of targets varies with time and perfect initialization is not available.
@cite_34 @cite_14 @cite_20 @cite_11
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Model-free trackers can track arbitrary objects based on a single (bounding-box) annotation of the object. Whilst the performance of model-free trackers has recently improved significantly, simultaneously tracking multiple objects with similar appearance remains very hard. In this paper, we propose a new multi-object model-free tracker (using a tracking-by-detection framework) that resolves this problem by incorporating spatial constraints between the objects. The spatial constraints are learned along with the object detectors using an online structured SVM algorithm. The experimental evaluation of our structure-preserving object tracker (SPOT) reveals substantial performance improvements in multi-object tracking. We also show that SPOT can improve the performance of single-object trackers by simultaneously tracking different parts of the object. Moreover, we show that SPOT can be used to adapt generic, model-based object detectors during tracking to tailor them towards a specific instance of that object. Enormous uncertainties in unconstrained environments lead to a fundamental dilemma that many tracking algorithms have to face in practice: Tracking has to be computationally efficient, but verifying whether or not the tracker is following the true target tends to be demanding, especially when the background is cluttered and or when occlusion occurs. Due to the lack of a good solution to this problem, many existing methods tend to be either effective but computationally intensive by using sophisticated image observation models or efficient but vulnerable to false alarms. This greatly challenges long-duration robust tracking. This paper presents a novel solution to this dilemma by considering the context of the tracking scene. Specifically, we integrate into the tracking process a set of auxiliary objects that are automatically discovered in the video on the fly by data mining. Auxiliary objects have three properties, at least in a short time interval: 1) persistent co-occurrence with the target, 2) consistent motion correlation to the target, and 3) easy to track. Regarding these auxiliary objects as the context of the target, the collaborative tracking of these auxiliary objects leads to efficient computation as well as strong verification. Our extensive experiments have exhibited exciting performance in very challenging real-world testing cases. Visual tracking in unconstrained environments is very challenging due to the existence of several sources of varieties such as changes in appearance, varying lighting conditions, cluttered background, and frame-cuts. A major factor causing tracking failure is the emergence of regions having similar appearance as the target. It is even more challenging when the target leaves the field of view (FoV) leading the tracker to follow another similar object, and not reacquire the right target when it reappears. This paper presents a method to address this problem by exploiting the context on-the-fly in two terms: Distracters and Supporters. Both of them are automatically explored using a sequential randomized forest, an online template-based appearance model, and local features. Distracters are regions which have similar appearance as the target and consistently co-occur with high confidence score. The tracker must keep tracking these distracters to avoid drifting. Supporters, on the other hand, are local key-points around the target with consistent co-occurrence and motion correlation in a short time span. They play an important role in verifying the genuine target. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world video sequences show the tracking improvement when using this context information. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art approaches are also provided. Objects are usually embedded into context. Visual context has been successfully used in object detection tasks, however, it is often ignored in object tracking. We propose a method to learn supporters which are, be it only temporally, useful for determining the position of the object of interest. Our approach exploits the General Hough Transform strategy. It couples the supporters with the target and naturally distinguishes between strongly and weakly coupled motions. By this, the position of an object can be estimated even when it is not seen directly (e.g., fully occluded or outside of the image region) or when it changes its appearance quickly and significantly. Experiments show substantial improvements in model-free tracking as well as in the tracking of “virtual” points, e.g., in medical applications.