Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework

The current popular two-stream, two-stage tracking framework extracts the template and the search region features separately and then performs relation modeling, thus the extracted features lack the awareness of the target and have limited target-background discriminability. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel one-stream tracking (OSTrack) framework that unifies feature learning and relation modeling by bridging the template-search image pairs with bidirectional information flows. In this way, discriminative target-oriented features can be dynamically extracted by mutual guidance. Since no extra heavy relation modeling module is needed and the implementation is highly parallelized, the proposed tracker runs at a fast speed. To further improve the inference efficiency, an in-network candidate early elimination module is proposed based on the strong similarity prior calculated in the one-stream framework. As a unified framework, OSTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, in particular, it shows impressive results on the one-shot tracking benchmark GOT-10k, i.e., achieving 73.7% AO, improving the existing best result (SwinTrack) by 4.3%. Besides, our method maintains a good performance-speed trade-off and shows faster convergence. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/botaoye/OSTrack.

Geometry-aware data augmentation for monocular 3D object detection

This paper focuses on monocular 3D object detection, one of the essential modules in autonomous driving systems. A key challenge is that the depth recovery problem is ill-posed in monocular data. In this work, we first conduct a thorough analysis to reveal how existing methods fail to robustly estimate depth when different geometry shifts occur. In particular, through a series of image-based and instance-based manipulations for current detectors, we illustrate existing detectors are vulnerable in capturing the consistent relationships between depth and both object apparent sizes and positions. To alleviate this issue and improve the robustness of detectors, we convert the aforementioned manipulations into four corresponding 3D-aware data augmentation techniques. At the image-level, we randomly manipulate the camera system, including its focal length, receptive field and location, to generate new training images with geometric shifts. At the instance level, we crop the foreground objects and randomly paste them to other scenes to generate new training instances. All the proposed augmentation techniques share the virtue that geometry relationships in objects are preserved while their geometry is manipulated. In light of the proposed data augmentation methods, not only the instability of depth recovery is effectively alleviated, but also the final 3D detection performance is significantly improved. This leads to superior improvements on the KITTI and nuScenes monocular 3D detection benchmarks with state-of-the-art results.