Tracking objects of interest in a video is one of the most popular and widely applicable problems in computer vision. However, with the years, a Cambrian explosion of use cases and benchmarks has fragmented the problem in a multitude of different experimental setups. As a consequence, the literature has fragmented too, and now novel approaches proposed by the community are usually specialised to fit only one specific setup. To understand to what extent this specialisation is necessary, in this work we present UniTrack, a solution to address five different tasks within the same framework. UniTrack consists of a single and task-agnostic appearance model, which can be learned in a supervised or self-supervised fashion, and multiple "heads" that address individual tasks and do not require training. We show how most tracking tasks can be solved within this framework, and that the same appearance model can be successfully used to obtain results that are competitive against specialised methods for most of the tasks considered. The framework also allows us to analyse appearance models obtained with the most recent self-supervised methods, thus extending their evaluation and comparison to a larger variety of important problems.

Tracking objects of interest in a video is one of the most popular and widely applicable problems in computer vision.

Simultaneously, a Dual-Branch Transformer Decoder is designed to adopt such motion and appearance information for candidate matching, thus distinguishing between targets and distractors.

Long-term visual object tracking benchmark.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained prominence in refining model fitting tasks in computer vision, particularly in domains involving deformable models like Active Appearance Models (AAMs). This paper explores the integration of GANs to enhance the AAM fitting process, addressing challenges in optimizing nonlinear parameters associated with appearance and shape variations. By leveraging GANs' adversarial training framework, the aim is to minimize fitting errors and improve convergence rates. Achieving robust performance even in cases with high appearance variability and occlusions. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements in accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional optimization techniques, thus establishing GANs as a potent tool for advanced image model fitting.

Identifying predictive world models for robots in novel environments from sparse online observations is essential for robot task planning and execution in novel environments. However, existing methods that leverage differentiable simulators to identify world models are incapable of jointly optimizing the shape, appearance, and physical properties of the scene. In this work, we introduce a novel object representation that allows the joint identification of these properties. Our method employs a novel differentiable point-based object representation coupled with a grid-based appearance field, which allows differentiable object collision detection and rendering. Combined with a differentiable physical simulator, we achieve end-to-end optimization of world models, given the sparse visual and tactile observations of a physical motion sequence. Through a series of system identification tasks in simulated and real environments, we show that our method can learn both simulation- and rendering-ready world models from only one robot action sequence.

In this work, we consider data association problems involving multi-object tracking (MOT). In particular, we address the challenges arising from object occlusions. We propose a framework called approximate dynamic programming track (ADPTrack), which applies dynamic programming principles to improve an existing method called the base heuristic. Given a set of tracks and the next target frame, the base heuristic extends the tracks by matching them to the objects of this target frame directly. In contrast, ADPTrack first processes a few subsequent frames and applies the base heuristic starting from the next target frame to obtain tentative tracks. It then leverages the tentative tracks to match the objects of the target frame. This tends to reduce the occlusion-based errors and leads to an improvement over the base heuristic. When tested on the MOT17 video dataset, the proposed method demonstrates a 0.7% improvement in the association accuracy (IDF1 metric) over a state-of-the-art method that is used as the base heuristic. It also obtains improvements with respect to all the other standard metrics. Empirically, we found that the improvements are particularly pronounced in scenarios where the video data is obtained by fixed-position cameras.

The Shape Boltzmann Machine (SBM) [1] has recently been introduced as a stateof-the-art model of foreground/background object shape. We extend the SBM to account for the foreground object's parts. Our new model, the Multinomial SBM (MSBM), can capture both local and global statistics of part shapes accurately. We combine the MSBM with an appearance model to form a fully generative model of images of objects. Parts-based object segmentations are obtained simply by performing probabilistic inference in the model. We apply the model to two challenging datasets which exhibit significant shape and appearance variability, and find that it obtains results that are comparable to the state-of-the-art. There has been significant focus in computer vision on object recognition and detection e.g.