BrackishMOT: The Brackish Multi-Object Tracking Dataset

There exist no publicly available annotated underwater multi-object tracking (MOT) datasets captured in turbid environments. To remedy this we propose the BrackishMOT dataset with focus on tracking schools of small fish, which is a notoriously difficult MOT task. BrackishMOT consists of 98 sequences captured in the wild. Alongside the novel dataset, we present baseline results by training a state-of-the-art tracker. Additionally, we propose a framework for creating synthetic sequences in order to expand the dataset. The framework consists of animated fish models and realistic underwater environments. We analyse the effects of including synthetic data during training and show that a combination of real and synthetic underwater training data can enhance tracking performance. Links to code and data can be found at https://www.vap.aau.dk/brackishmot

MOTCOM: The Multi-Object Tracking Dataset Complexity Metric

There exists no comprehensive metric for describing the complexity of Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) sequences. This lack of metrics decreases explainability, complicates comparison of datasets, and reduces the conversation on tracker performance to a matter of leader board position. As a remedy, we present the novel MOT dataset complexity metric (MOTCOM), which is a combination of three sub-metrics inspired by key problems in MOT: occlusion, erratic motion, and visual similarity. The insights of MOTCOM can open nuanced discussions on tracker performance and may lead to a wider acknowledgement of novel contributions developed for either less known datasets or those aimed at solving sub-problems. We evaluate MOTCOM on the comprehensive MOT17, MOT20, and MOTSynth datasets and show that MOTCOM is far better at describing the complexity of MOT sequences compared to the conventional density and number of tracks. Project page at https://vap.aau.dk/motcom

3D-ZeF: A 3D Zebrafish Tracking Benchmark Dataset

In this work we present a novel publicly available stereo based 3D RGB dataset for multi-object zebrafish tracking, called 3D-ZeF. Zebrafish is an increasingly popular model organism used for studying neurological disorders, drug addiction, and more. Behavioral analysis is often a critical part of such research. However, visual similarity, occlusion, and erratic movement of the zebrafish makes robust 3D tracking a challenging and unsolved problem. The proposed dataset consists of eight sequences with a duration between 15-120 seconds and 1-10 free moving zebrafish. The videos have been annotated with a total of 86,400 points and bounding boxes. Furthermore, we present a complexity score and a novel open-source modular baseline system for 3D tracking of zebrafish. The performance of the system is measured with respect to two detectors: a naive approach and a Faster R-CNN based fish head detector. The system reaches a MOTA of up to 77.6%. Links to the code and dataset is available at the project page https://vap.aau.dk/3d-zef