DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion

A typical pipeline for multi-object tracking (MOT) is to use a detector for object localization, and following re-identification (re-ID) for object association. This pipeline is partially motivated by recent progress in both object detection and re-ID, and partially motivated by biases in existing tracking datasets, where most objects tend to have distinguishing appearance and re-ID models are sufficient for establishing associations. In response to such bias, we would like to re-emphasize that methods for multi-object tracking should also work when object appearance is not sufficiently discriminative. To this end, we propose a large-scale dataset for multi-human tracking, where humans have similar appearance, diverse motion and extreme articulation. As the dataset contains mostly group dancing videos, we name it "DanceTrack". We expect DanceTrack to provide a better platform to develop more MOT algorithms that rely less on visual discrimination and depend more on motion analysis. We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers on our dataset and observe a significant performance drop on DanceTrack when compared against existing benchmarks. The dataset, project code and competition server are released at: \url{https://github.com/DanceTrack}.

ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, called BYTE, tracking BY associaTing Every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. We apply BYTE to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers and achieve consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.

Objects in Semantic Topology

A more realistic object detection paradigm, Open-World Object Detection, has arisen increasing research interests in the community recently. A qualified open-world object detector can not only identify objects of known categories, but also discover unknown objects, and incrementally learn to categorize them when their annotations progressively arrive. Previous works rely on independent modules to recognize unknown categories and perform incremental learning, respectively. In this paper, we provide a unified perspective: Semantic Topology. During the life-long learning of an open-world object detector, all object instances from the same category are assigned to their corresponding pre-defined node in the semantic topology, including the `unknown' category. This constraint builds up discriminative feature representations and consistent relationships among objects, thus enabling the detector to distinguish unknown objects out of the known categories, as well as making learned features of known objects undistorted when learning new categories incrementally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that semantic topology, either randomly-generated or derived from a well-trained language model, could outperform the current state-of-the-art open-world object detectors by a large margin, e.g., the absolute open-set error is reduced from 7832 to 2546, exhibiting the inherent superiority of semantic topology on open-world object detection.

Towards High-Quality Temporal Action Detection with Sparse Proposals

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) is an essential and challenging topic in video understanding, aiming to localize the temporal segments containing human action instances and predict the action categories. The previous works greatly rely upon dense candidates either by designing varying anchors or enumerating all the combinations of boundaries on video sequences; therefore, they are related to complicated pipelines and sensitive hand-crafted designs. Recently, with the resurgence of Transformer, query-based methods have tended to become the rising solutions for their simplicity and flexibility. However, there still exists a performance gap between query-based methods and well-established methods. In this paper, we identify the main challenge lies in the large variants of action duration and the ambiguous boundaries for short action instances; nevertheless, quadratic-computational global attention prevents query-based methods to build multi-scale feature maps. Towards high-quality temporal action detection, we introduce Sparse Proposals to interact with the hierarchical features. In our method, named SP-TAD, each proposal attends to a local segment feature in the temporal feature pyramid. The local interaction enables utilization of high-resolution features to preserve action instances details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially under high tIoU thresholds. E.g., we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14 (45.7% on mAP@0.6, 33.4% on mAP@0.7 and 53.5% on mAP@Avg) and competitive results on ActivityNet-1.3 (32.99% on mAP@Avg). Code will be made available at https://github.com/wjn922/SP-TAD.

Segmenting Transparent Object in the Wild with Transformer

This work presents a new fine-grained transparent object segmentation dataset, termed Trans10K-v2, extending Trans10K-v1, the first large-scale transparent object segmentation dataset. Unlike Trans10K-v1 that only has two limited categories, our new dataset has several appealing benefits. (1) It has 11 fine-grained categories of transparent objects, commonly occurring in the human domestic environment, making it more practical for real-world application. (2) Trans10K-v2 brings more challenges for the current advanced segmentation methods than its former version. Furthermore, a novel transformer-based segmentation pipeline termed Trans2Seg is proposed. Firstly, the transformer encoder of Trans2Seg provides the global receptive field in contrast to CNN's local receptive field, which shows excellent advantages over pure CNN architectures. Secondly, by formulating semantic segmentation as a problem of dictionary look-up, we design a set of learnable prototypes as the query of Trans2Seg's transformer decoder, where each prototype learns the statistics of one category in the whole dataset. We benchmark more than 20 recent semantic segmentation methods, demonstrating that Trans2Seg significantly outperforms all the CNN-based methods, showing the proposed algorithm's potential ability to solve transparent object segmentation.

Trans2Seg: Transparent Object Segmentation with Transformer

This work presents a new fine-grained transparent object segmentation dataset, termed Trans10K-v2, extending Trans10K-v1, the first large-scale transparent object segmentation dataset. Unlike Trans10K-v1 that only has two limited categories, our new dataset has several appealing benefits. (1) It has 11 fine-grained categories of transparent objects, commonly occurring in the human domestic environment, making it more practical for real-world application. (2) Trans10K-v2 brings more challenges for the current advanced segmentation methods than its former version. Furthermore, a novel transformer-based segmentation pipeline termed Trans2Seg is proposed. Firstly, the transformer encoder of Trans2Seg provides the global receptive field in contrast to CNN's local receptive field, which shows excellent advantages over pure CNN architectures. Secondly, by formulating semantic segmentation as a problem of dictionary look-up, we design a set of learnable prototypes as the query of Trans2Seg's transformer decoder, where each prototype learns the statistics of one category in the whole dataset. We benchmark more than 20 recent semantic segmentation methods, demonstrating that Trans2Seg significantly outperforms all the CNN-based methods, showing the proposed algorithm's potential ability to solve transparent object segmentation.

TransTrack: Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer

Multiple-object tracking(MOT) is mostly dominated by complex and multi-step tracking-by-detection algorithm, which performs object detection, feature extraction and temporal association, separately. Query-key mechanism in single-object tracking(SOT), which tracks the object of the current frame by object feature of the previous frame, has great potential to set up a simple joint-detection-and-tracking MOT paradigm. Nonetheless, the query-key method is seldom studied due to its inability to detect new-coming objects. In this work, we propose TransTrack, a baseline for MOT with Transformer. It takes advantage of query-key mechanism and introduces a set of learned object queries into the pipeline to enable detecting new-coming objects. TransTrack has three main advantages: (1) It is an online joint-detection-and-tracking pipeline based on query-key mechanism. Complex and multi-step components in the previous methods are simplified. (2) It is a brand new architecture based on Transformer. The learned object query detects objects in the current frame. The object feature query from the previous frame associates those current objects with the previous ones. (3) For the first time, we demonstrate a much simple and effective method based on query-key mechanism and Transformer architecture could achieve competitive 65.8\% MOTA on the MOT17 challenge dataset. We hope TransTrack can provide a new perspective for multiple-object tracking. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PeizeSun/TransTrack}.

OneNet: Towards End-to-End One-Stage Object Detection

End-to-end one-stage object detection trailed thus far. This paper discovers that the lack of classification cost between sample and ground-truth in label assignment is the main obstacle for one-stage detectors to remove Non-maximum Suppression(NMS) and reach end-to-end. Existing one-stage object detectors assign labels by only location cost, e.g. box IoU or point distance. Without classification cost, sole location cost leads to redundant boxes of high confidence scores in inference, making NMS necessary post-processing. To design an end-to-end one-stage object detector, we propose Minimum Cost Assignment. The cost is the summation of classification cost and location cost between sample and ground-truth. For each object ground-truth, only one sample of minimum cost is assigned as the positive sample; others are all negative samples. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we design an extremely simple one-stage detector named OneNet. Our results show that when trained with Minimum Cost Assignment, OneNet avoids producing duplicated boxes and achieves to end-to-end detector. On COCO dataset, OneNet achieves 35.0 AP/80 FPS and 37.7 AP/50 FPS with image size of 512 pixels. We hope OneNet could serve as an effective baseline for end-to-end one-stage object detection. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PeizeSun/OneNet}.

Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals

We present Sparse R-CNN, a purely sparse method for object detection in images. Existing works on object detection heavily rely on dense object candidates, such as $k$ anchor boxes pre-defined on all grids of image feature map of size $H\times W$. In our method, however, a fixed sparse set of learned object proposals, total length of $N$, are provided to object recognition head to perform classification and location. By eliminating $HWk$ (up to hundreds of thousands) hand-designed object candidates to $N$ (e.g. 100) learnable proposals, Sparse R-CNN completely avoids all efforts related to object candidates design and many-to-one label assignment. More importantly, final predictions are directly output without non-maximum suppression post-procedure. Sparse R-CNN demonstrates accuracy, run-time and training convergence performance on par with the well-established detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset, e.g., achieving 44.5 AP in standard $3\times$ training schedule and running at 22 fps using ResNet-50 FPN model. We hope our work could inspire re-thinking the convention of dense prior in object detectors. The code is available at: https://github.com/PeizeSun/SparseR-CNN.

TextSR: Content-Aware Text Super-Resolution Guided by Recognition

Scene text recognition has witnessed rapid development with the advance of convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, most of the previous methods may not work well in recognizing text with low resolution which is often seen in natural scene images. An intuitive solution is to introduce super-resolution techniques as pre-processing. However, conventional super-resolution methods in the literature mainly focus on reconstructing the detailed texture of natural images, which typically do not work well for text due to the unique characteristics of text. To tackle these problems, in this work, we propose a content-aware text super-resolution network to generate the information desired for text recognition. In particular, we design an end-to-end network that can perform super-resolution and text recognition simultaneously. Different from previous super-resolution methods, we use the loss of text recognition as the Text Perceptual Loss to guide the training of the super-resolution network, and thus it pays more attention to the text content, rather than the irrelevant background area. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in restoring a sharp high-resolution image from a small blurred one, and show that the recognition performance clearly boosts up the performance of text recognizer. To our knowledge, this is the first work focusing on text super-resolution. Code will be released in https://github.com/xieenze/TextSR.