Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization

Abstract: Visual object tracking is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision, with a wide number of practical applications in e.g.\ robotics, surveillance etc. Given a video sequence and the target bounding box in the first frame, a tracker is required to find the target in all subsequent frames. It is a challenging problem due to the limited training data available. An object tracker is generally evaluated using two criterias, namely robustness and accuracy. Robustness refers to the ability of a tracker to track for long durations, without losing the target. Accuracy, on the other hand, denotes how accurately a tracker can estimate the target bounding box. Recent years have seen significant improvement in tracking robustness. However, the problem of accurate tracking has seen less attention. Most current state-of-the-art trackers resort to a naive multi-scale search strategy which has fundamental limitations. Thus, in this thesis, we aim to develop a general target estimation component which can be used to determine accurate bounding box for tracking. We will investigate how bounding box estimators used in object detection can be modified to be used for object tracking. The key difference between detection and tracking is that in object detection, the classes to which the objects belong are known. However, in tracking, no prior information is available about the tracked object, other than a single image provided in the first frame. We will thus investigate different architectures to utilize the first frame information to provide target specific bounding box predictions. We will also investigate how the bounding box predictors can be integrated into a state-of-the-art tracking method to obtain robust as well as accurate tracking.