Automatically detecting, labeling, and tracking objects in videos depends first and foremost on accurate category-level object detectors. These might, however, not always be available in practice, as acquiring high-quality large scale labeled training datasets is either too costly or impractical for all possible real-world application scenarios. A scalable solution consists in re-using object detectors pre-trained on generic datasets. This work is the first to investigate the problem of on-line domain adaptation of object detectors for causal multi-object tracking (MOT). We propose to alleviate the dataset bias by adapting detectors from category to instances, and back: (i) we jointly learn all target models by adapting them from the pre-trained one, and (ii) we also adapt the pre-trained model on-line. We introduce an on-line multi-task learning algorithm to efficiently share parameters and reduce drift, while gradually improving recall. Our approach is applicable to any linear object detector, and we evaluate both cheap "mini-Fisher Vectors" and expensive "off-the-shelf" ConvNet features. We quantitatively measure the benefit of our domain adaptation strategy on the KITTI tracking benchmark and on a new dataset (PASCAL-to-KITTI) we introduce to study the domain mismatch problem in MOT.
A method for online, real-time tracking of objects is presented. Tracking is treated as a repeated detection problem where potential target objects are identified with a pre-trained category detector and object identity across frames is established by individual-specific detectors. The individual detectors are (re-)trained online from a single positive example whenever there is a coincident category detection. This ensures that the tracker is robust to drift. Real-time operation is possible since an individual-object detector is obtained through elementary manipulations of the thresholds of the category detector and therefore only minimal additional computations are required. Our tracking algorithm is benchmarked against nine state-of-the-art trackers on two large, publicly available and challenging video datasets. We find that our algorithm is 10 more accurate and nearly as fast as the fastest of the competing algorithms, and it is as accurate but 20 times faster than the most accurate of the competing algorithms.