Predicting the Best of N Visual Trackers

We observe that the performance of SOTA visual trackers surprisingly strongly varies across different video attributes and datasets. No single tracker remains the best performer across all tracking attributes and datasets. To bridge this gap, for a given video sequence, we predict the "Best of the N Trackers", called the BofN meta-tracker. At its core, a Tracking Performance Prediction Network (TP2N) selects a predicted best performing visual tracker for the given video sequence using only a few initial frames. We also introduce a frame-level BofN meta-tracker which keeps predicting best performer after regular temporal intervals. The TP2N is based on self-supervised learning architectures MocoV2, SwAv, BT, and DINO; experiments show that the DINO with ViT-S as a backbone performs the best. The video-level BofN meta-tracker outperforms, by a large margin, existing SOTA trackers on nine standard benchmarks - LaSOT, TrackingNet, GOT-10K, VOT2019, VOT2021, VOT2022, UAV123, OTB100, and WebUAV-3M. Further improvement is achieved by the frame-level BofN meta-tracker effectively handling variations in the tracking scenarios within long sequences. For instance, on GOT-10k, BofN meta-tracker average overlap is 88.7% and 91.1% with video and frame-level settings respectively. The best performing tracker, RTS, achieves 85.20% AO. On VOT2022, BofN expected average overlap is 67.88% and 70.98% with video and frame level settings, compared to the best performing ARTrack, 64.12%. This work also presents an extensive evaluation of competitive tracking methods on all commonly used benchmarks, following their protocols. The code, the trained models, and the results will soon be made publicly available on https://github.com/BasitAlawode/Best_of_N_Trackers.

Learning Spatial-Temporal Regularized Tensor Sparse RPCA for Background Subtraction

Video background subtraction is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision that aims to segment all moving objects. Robust principal component analysis has been identified as a promising unsupervised paradigm for background subtraction tasks in the last decade thanks to its competitive performance in a number of benchmark datasets. Tensor robust principal component analysis variations have improved background subtraction performance further. However, because moving object pixels in the sparse component are treated independently and do not have to adhere to spatial-temporal structured-sparsity constraints, performance is reduced for sequences with dynamic backgrounds, camouflaged, and camera jitter problems. In this work, we present a spatial-temporal regularized tensor sparse RPCA algorithm for precise background subtraction. Within the sparse component, we impose spatial-temporal regularizations in the form of normalized graph-Laplacian matrices. To do this, we build two graphs, one across the input tensor spatial locations and the other across its frontal slices in the time domain. While maximizing the objective function, we compel the tensor sparse component to serve as the spatiotemporal eigenvectors of the graph-Laplacian matrices. The disconnected moving object pixels in the sparse component are preserved by the proposed graph-based regularizations since they both comprise of spatiotemporal subspace-based structure. Additionally, we propose a unique objective function that employs batch and online-based optimization methods to jointly maximize the background-foreground and spatial-temporal regularization components. Experiments are performed on six publicly available background subtraction datasets that demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to several existing methods. Our source code will be available very soon.

Improving Underwater Visual Tracking With a Large Scale Dataset and Image Enhancement

This paper presents a new dataset and general tracker enhancement method for Underwater Visual Object Tracking (UVOT). Despite its significance, underwater tracking has remained unexplored due to data inaccessibility. It poses distinct challenges; the underwater environment exhibits non-uniform lighting conditions, low visibility, lack of sharpness, low contrast, camouflage, and reflections from suspended particles. Performance of traditional tracking methods designed primarily for terrestrial or open-air scenarios drops in such conditions. We address the problem by proposing a novel underwater image enhancement algorithm designed specifically to boost tracking quality. The method has resulted in a significant performance improvement, of up to 5.0% AUC, of state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual trackers. To develop robust and accurate UVOT methods, large-scale datasets are required. To this end, we introduce a large-scale UVOT benchmark dataset consisting of 400 video segments and 275,000 manually annotated frames enabling underwater training and evaluation of deep trackers. The videos are labelled with several underwater-specific tracking attributes including watercolor variation, target distractors, camouflage, target relative size, and low visibility conditions. The UVOT400 dataset, tracking results, and the code are publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/UWVOT400.