text: We present a semi-supervised approach that localizes multiple unknown object instances in long videos. We start with a handful of labeled boxes and iteratively learn and label hundreds of thousands of object instances. We propose criteria for reliable object detection and tracking for constraining the semi-supervised learning process and minimizing semantic drift. Our approach does not assume exhaustive labeling of each object instance in any single frame, or any explicit annotation of negative data. Working in such a generic setting allow us to tackle multiple object instances in video, many of which are static. In contrast, existing approaches either do not consider multiple object instances per video, or rely heavily on the motion of the objects present. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating the automatically labeled data on a variety of metrics like quality, coverage (recall), diversity, and relevance to training an object detector.
  @cite_33: Evaluating visual tracking algorithms, or trackers for short, is of great importance in computer vision. However, it is hard to fairly compare trackers due to many parameters need to be tuned in the experimental configurations. On the other hand, when introducing a new tracker, a recent trend is to validate it by comparing it with several existing ones. Such an evaluation may have subjective biases towards the new tracker which typically performs the best. This is mainly due to the difficulty to optimally tune all its competitors and sometimes the selected testing sequences. By contrast, little subjective bias exists towards the second best ones in the contest. This observation inspires us with a novel perspective towards inhibiting subjective bias in evaluating trackers by analyzing the results between the second bests. In particular, we first collect all tracking papers published in major computer vision venues in recent years. From these papers, after filtering out potential biases in various aspects, we create a dataset containing many records of comparison results between various visual trackers. Using these records, we derive performance rankings of the involved trackers by four different methods. The first two methods model the dataset as a graph and then derive the rankings over the graph, one by a rank aggregation algorithm and the other by a PageRank-like solution. The other two methods take the records as generated from sports contests and adopt widely used Elo's and Glicko's rating systems to derive the rankings. The experimental results are presented and may serve as a reference for related research.
  @cite_48: Recently, on-line adaptation of binary classifiers for tracking have been investigated. On-line learning allows for simple classifiers since only the current view of the object from its surrounding background needs to be discriminiated. However, on-line adaption faces one key problem: Each update of the tracker may introduce an error which, finally, can lead to tracking failure (drifting). The contribution of this paper is a novel on-line semi-supervised boosting method which significantly alleviates the drifting problem in tracking applications. This allows to limit the drifting problem while still staying adaptive to appearance changes. The main idea is to formulate the update process in a semi-supervised fashion as combined decision of a given prior and an on-line classifier. This comes without any parameter tuning. In the experiments, we demonstrate real-time tracking of our SemiBoost tracker on several challenging test sequences where our tracker outperforms other on-line tracking methods.
  @cite_9: We address the problem of long-term object tracking, where the object may become occluded or leave-the-view. In this setting, we show that an accurate appearance model is considerably more effective than a strong motion model. We develop simple but effective algorithms that alternate between tracking and learning a good appearance model given a track. We show that it is crucial to learn from the "right" frames, and use the formalism of self-paced curriculum learning to automatically select such frames. We leverage techniques from object detection for learning accurate appearance-based templates, demonstrating the importance of using a large negative training set (typically not used for tracking). We describe both an offline algorithm (that processes frames in batch) and a linear-time on-line (i.e. causal) algorithm that approaches real-time performance. Our models significantly outperform prior art, reducing the average error on benchmark videos by a factor of 4.
  @cite_53: 
  @cite_40: 
  @cite_27: Adaptive tracking-by-detection methods are widely used in computer vision for tracking arbitrary objects. Current approaches treat the tracking problem as a classification task and use online learning techniques to update the object model. However, for these updates to happen one needs to convert the estimated object position into a set of labelled training examples, and it is not clear how best to perform this intermediate step. Furthermore, the objective for the classifier (label prediction) is not explicitly coupled to the objective for the tracker (accurate estimation of object position). In this paper, we present a framework for adaptive visual object tracking based on structured output prediction. By explicitly allowing the output space to express the needs of the tracker, we are able to avoid the need for an intermediate classification step. Our method uses a kernelized structured output support vector machine (SVM), which is learned online to provide adaptive tracking. To allow for real-time application, we introduce a budgeting mechanism which prevents the unbounded growth in the number of support vectors which would otherwise occur during tracking. Experimentally, we show that our algorithm is able to outperform state-of-the-art trackers on various benchmark videos. Additionally, we show that we can easily incorporate additional features and kernels into our framework, which results in increased performance.
  @cite_45: Many learning tasks for computer vision problems can be described by multiple views or multiple features. These views can be exploited in order to learn from unlabeled data, a.k.a. "multi-view learning". In these methods, usually the classifiers iteratively label each other a subset of the unlabeled data and ignore the rest. In this work, we propose a new multi-view boosting algorithm that, unlike other approaches, specifically encodes the uncertainties over the unlabeled samples in terms of given priors. Instead of ignoring the unlabeled samples during the training phase of each view, we use the different views to provide an aggregated prior which is then used as a regularization term inside a semisupervised boosting method. Since we target multi-class applications, we first introduce a multi-class boosting algorithm based on maximizing the mutli-class classification margin. Then, we propose our multi-class semisupervised boosting algorithm which is able to use priors as a regularization component over the unlabeled data. Since the priors may contain a significant amount of noise, we introduce a new loss function for the unlabeled regularization which is robust to noisy priors. Experimentally, we show that the multi-class boosting algorithms achieves state-of-theart results in machine learning benchmarks. We also show that the new proposed loss function is more robust compared to other alternatives. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of our multi-view boosting approach for object category recognition and visual object tracking tasks, compared to other multi-view learning methods.
  @cite_11: 
summary: A relevant thread of work which also uses bounding box annotations is that of tracking-by-detection. It has a long and rich history in computer vision and the reader is referred to @cite_33 for a survey. The tracking-by-detection algorithms start with bounding box annotation(s) of the object(s) to track the object(s) over a long period of time. The underlying assumption is that negative data can be sampled from around the object @cite_9 @cite_40 @cite_11 @cite_27 @cite_45 @cite_48 @cite_53 to distinguish between the object and background. This is not valid in the case of videos because the unmarked regions may contain more instances of the same object, rather than background.