Cited by 798Video Surveillance and Tracking MethodsAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsVisual Attention and Saliency Detection

Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking

Open access
Danelljan, Martin, Van Gool, Luc, Timofte, Radu·2020·2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Visual tracking is fundamentally the problem of regressing the state of the target in each video frame. While significant progress has been achieved, trackers are still prone to failures and inaccuracies. It is therefore crucial to represent the uncertainty in the target estimation. Although current prominent paradigms rely on estimating a state-dependent confidence score, this value lacks a clear probabilistic interpretation, complicating its use. In this work, we therefore propose a probabilistic regression formulation and apply it to tracking. Our network predicts the conditional probability density of the target state given an input image. Crucially, our formulation is capable of modeling label noise stemming from inaccurate annotations and ambiguities in the task. The regression network is trained by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. When applied for tracking, our formulation not only allows a probabilistic representation of the output, but also substantially improves the performance. Our tracker sets a new state-of-the-art on six datasets, achieving 59.8% AUC on LaSOT and 75.8% Success on TrackingNet. The code and models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking.

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Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr42600.2020.00721

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  • Previous trackers' pipelines are complicated: they generate many box proposals with confidence scores and use post-processing to choose the best bounding box.

    “The tracking pipelines of previous trackers [25, 51, 60, 47] are complicated. Specifically, they first generate a large number of box proposals with confidence scores, then use various post-processing to choose the best bounding box as the tracking result.”

    From Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking (2021) · cites this paper as [47]

    Section 2.2 (p. 3) describes recent trackers with a two-stage pipeline: coarse localization followed by bounding-box regression using confidence scores. It says the final box is obtained by gradient-based maximization, but does not say these trackers generate a large number of proposals during tracking or use various post-processing steps to choose a box; the box sampling it mentions occurs during training. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Previous models have to improve nonlinear representation ability by introducing fashion structures, using additional modules, or designing effective online updaters.

    “Thus, previous models have to improve the nonlinear representation ability by introducing fashion structures [21, 44, 48], using additional modules [7, 46, 13], designing effective online updaters [2, 47, 10], to name a few.”

    From Transformer Tracking (2021) · cites this paper as [10]

    The Target Center Regression Module (p. 11) describes a designed optimizer module and says the tracker gradually updates its memory during tracking, supporting the citation’s online-updater example. The paper does not establish that this updater improves nonlinear representation ability, so that stated purpose is not supported. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Current prevailing trackers, including offline Siamese trackers and online learning models, are almost all built upon convolutional operations.

    “Current prevailing trackers, including both the offline Siamese trackers and the online learning models, are almost all build upon convolutional operations [2, 37, 3, 47].”

    From Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking (2021) · cites this paper as [47]

  • On NFS, PrDiMP achieves an AUC score of 63.5%.

    “The previous best method, PrDiMP, achieves an AUC score of 63.5%.”

    From Transformer Tracking (2021) · cites this paper as [10]

  • On NFS, TransT performs better than PrDiMP with a gain of 2.2%.

    “Our method performs better than PrDiMP with a gain of 2.2%.”

    From Transformer Tracking (2021) · cites this paper as [10]

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. [16][16] Cl´ ement Godard, Oisin Mac Aodha, and Gabriel J. Brostow. Unsupervised monocular depth estimation with leftright consistency. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR , pages 6602-6611, 2017. 2 -

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Authors
Danelljan, M., Van Gool, L., & Timofte, R.
Affiliations
ETH Zurich (CH)
Venue
2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2020-06
Pages
7181-7190
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3013266062
Cited by
798
References
52
Citations by year
2026: 70 · 2025: 121 · 2024: 165 · 2023: 178 · 2022: 151 · 2021: 99 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 1
FWCI
33.65
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Lirias (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Nvidia
  • Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Keywords
visual object tracking, probabilistic regression, uncertainty estimation, conditional probability density, label noise, Kullback-Leibler divergence, target state estimation, confidence scores

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