Performance Evaluation Methodology for Long-Term Visual Object Tracking

A long-term visual object tracking performance evaluation methodology and a benchmark are proposed. Performance measures are designed by following a long-term tracking definition to maximize the analysis probing strength. The new measures outperform existing ones in interpretation potential and in better distinguishing between different tracking behaviors. We show that these measures generalize the short-term performance measures, thus linking the two tracking problems. Furthermore, the new measures are highly robust to temporal annotation sparsity and allow annotation of sequences hundreds of times longer than in the current datasets without increasing manual annotation labor. A new challenging dataset of carefully selected sequences with many target disappearances is proposed. A new tracking taxonomy is proposed to position trackers on the short-term/long-term spectrum. The benchmark contains an extensive evaluation of the largest number of long-term tackers and comparison to state-of-the-art short-term trackers. We analyze the influence of tracking architecture implementations to long-term performance and explore various re-detection strategies as well as influence of visual model update strategies to long-term tracking drift. The methodology is integrated in the VOT toolkit to automate experimental analysis and benchmarking and to facilitate future development of long-term trackers.