MambaEVT: Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking using State Space Model

Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT

Hierarchical IoU Tracking based on Interval

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) aims to detect and associate all targets of given classes across frames. Current dominant solutions, e.g. ByteTrack and StrongSORT++, follow the hybrid pipeline, which first accomplish most of the associations in an online manner, and then refine the results using offline tricks such as interpolation and global link. While this paradigm offers flexibility in application, the disjoint design between the two stages results in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchical IoU Tracking framework, dubbed HIT, which achieves unified hierarchical tracking by utilizing tracklet intervals as priors. To ensure the conciseness, only IoU is utilized for association, while discarding the heavy appearance models, tricky auxiliary cues, and learning-based association modules. We further identify three inconsistency issues regarding target size, camera movement and hierarchical cues, and design corresponding solutions to guarantee the reliability of associations. Though its simplicity, our method achieves promising performance on four datasets, i.e., MOT17, KITTI, DanceTrack and VisDrone, providing a strong baseline for future tracking method design. Moreover, we experiment on seven trackers and prove that HIT can be seamlessly integrated with other solutions, whether they are motion-based, appearance-based or learning-based. Our codes will be released at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/HIT.

MindShot: Brain Decoding Framework Using Only One Image

Brain decoding, which aims at reconstructing visual stimuli from brain signals, primarily utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has recently made positive progress. However, it is impeded by significant challenges such as the difficulty of acquiring fMRI-image pairs and the variability of individuals, etc. Most methods have to adopt the per-subject-per-model paradigm, greatly limiting their applications. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a new and meaningful task, few-shot brain decoding, while it will face two inherent difficulties: 1) the scarcity of fMRI-image pairs and the noisy signals can easily lead to overfitting; 2) the inadequate guidance complicates the training of a robust encoder. Therefore, a novel framework named MindShot, is proposed to achieve effective few-shot brain decoding by leveraging cross-subject prior knowledge. Firstly, inspired by the hemodynamic response function (HRF), the HRF adapter is applied to eliminate unexplainable cognitive differences between subjects with small trainable parameters. Secondly, a Fourier-based cross-subject supervision method is presented to extract additional high-level and low-level biological guidance information from signals of other subjects. Under the MindShot, new subjects and pretrained individuals only need to view images of the same semantic class, significantly expanding the model's applicability. Experimental results demonstrate MindShot's ability of reconstructing semantically faithful images in few-shot scenarios and outperforms methods based on the per-subject-per-model paradigm. The promising results of the proposed method not only validate the feasibility of few-shot brain decoding but also provide the possibility for the learning of large models under the condition of reducing data dependence.

Bring Adaptive Binding Prototypes to Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) has attracted rising attention, aiming to identify and segment objects based on natural language expressions. While substantial progress has been made in RES, the emergence of Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) introduces new challenges by allowing expressions to describe multiple objects or lack specific object references. Existing RES methods, usually rely on sophisticated encoder-decoder and feature fusion modules, and are difficult to generate class prototypes that match each instance individually when confronted with the complex referent and binary labels of GRES. In this paper, reevaluating the differences between RES and GRES, we propose a novel Model with Adaptive Binding Prototypes (MABP) that adaptively binds queries to object features in the corresponding region. It enables different query vectors to match instances of different categories or different parts of the same instance, significantly expanding the decoder's flexibility, dispersing global pressure across all queries, and easing the demands on the encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that MABP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all three splits on gRefCOCO dataset. Meanwhile, MABP also surpasses state-of-the-art methods on RefCOCO+ and G-Ref datasets, and achieves very competitive results on RefCOCO. Code is available at https://github.com/buptLwz/MABP

MLS-Track: Multilevel Semantic Interaction in RMOT

The new trend in multi-object tracking task is to track objects of interest using natural language. However, the scarcity of paired prompt-instance data hinders its progress. To address this challenge, we propose a high-quality yet low-cost data generation method base on Unreal Engine 5 and construct a brand-new benchmark dataset, named Refer-UE-City, which primarily includes scenes from intersection surveillance videos, detailing the appearance and actions of people and vehicles. Specifically, it provides 14 videos with a total of 714 expressions, and is comparable in scale to the Refer-KITTI dataset. Additionally, we propose a multi-level semantic-guided multi-object framework called MLS-Track, where the interaction between the model and text is enhanced layer by layer through the introduction of Semantic Guidance Module (SGM) and Semantic Correlation Branch (SCB). Extensive experiments on Refer-UE-City and Refer-KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and datatsets will be available.

PracticalDG: Perturbation Distillation on Vision-Language Models for Hybrid Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to resolve distribution shifts between source and target domains, and current DG methods are default to the setting that data from source and target domains share identical categories. Nevertheless, there exists unseen classes from target domains in practical scenarios. To address this issue, Open Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) has emerged and several methods have been exclusively proposed. However, most existing methods adopt complex architectures with slight improvement compared with DG methods. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have been introduced in DG following the fine-tuning paradigm, but consume huge training overhead with large vision models. Therefore, in this paper, we innovate to transfer knowledge from VLMs to lightweight vision models and improve the robustness by introducing Perturbation Distillation (PD) from three perspectives, including Score, Class and Instance (SCI), named SCI-PD. Moreover, previous methods are oriented by the benchmarks with identical and fixed splits, ignoring the divergence between source domains. These methods are revealed to suffer from sharp performance decay with our proposed new benchmark Hybrid Domain Generalization (HDG) and a novel metric $H^{2}$-CV, which construct various splits to comprehensively assess the robustness of algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple datasets, especially improving the robustness when confronting data scarcity.

YYDS: Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification with Coarse Descriptions

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to considerable cross-modality discrepancies. Existing works mainly focus on learning modality-invariant features while suppressing modality-specific ones. However, retrieving visible images only depends on infrared samples is an extreme problem because of the absence of color information. To this end, we present the Refer-VI-ReID settings, which aims to match target visible images from both infrared images and coarse language descriptions (e.g., "a man with red top and black pants") to complement the missing color information. To address this task, we design a Y-Y-shape decomposition structure, dubbed YYDS, to decompose and aggregate texture and color features of targets. Specifically, the text-IoU regularization strategy is firstly presented to facilitate the decomposition training, and a joint relation module is then proposed to infer the aggregation. Furthermore, the cross-modal version of k-reciprocal re-ranking algorithm is investigated, named CMKR, in which three neighbor search strategies and one local query expansion method are explored to alleviate the modality bias problem of the near neighbors. We conduct experiments on SYSU-MM01, RegDB and LLCM datasets with our manually annotated descriptions. Both YYDS and CMKR achieve remarkable improvements over SOTA methods on all three datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/YYDS.

iKUN: Speak to Trackers without Retraining

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) aims to track multiple objects based on input textual descriptions. Previous works realize it by simply integrating an extra textual module into the multi-object tracker. However, they typically need to retrain the entire framework and have difficulties in optimization. In this work, we propose an insertable Knowledge Unification Network, termed iKUN, to enable communication with off-the-shelf trackers in a plug-and-play manner. Concretely, a knowledge unification module (KUM) is designed to adaptively extract visual features based on textual guidance. Meanwhile, to improve the localization accuracy, we present a neural version of Kalman filter (NKF) to dynamically adjust process noise and observation noise based on the current motion status. Moreover, to address the problem of open-set long-tail distribution of textual descriptions, a test-time similarity calibration method is proposed to refine the confidence score with pseudo frequency. Extensive experiments on Refer-KITTI dataset verify the effectiveness of our framework. Finally, to speed up the development of RMOT, we also contribute a more challenging dataset, Refer-Dance, by extending public DanceTrack dataset with motion and dressing descriptions. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/dyhBUPT/iKUN.

Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perception

Understanding vehicles in images is important for various applications such as intelligent transportation and self-driving system. Existing vehicle-centric works typically pre-train models on large-scale classification datasets and then fine-tune them for specific downstream tasks. However, they neglect the specific characteristics of vehicle perception in different tasks and might thus lead to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel vehicle-centric pre-training framework called VehicleMAE, which incorporates the structural information including the spatial structure from vehicle profile information and the semantic structure from informative high-level natural language descriptions for effective masked vehicle appearance reconstruction. To be specific, we explicitly extract the sketch lines of vehicles as a form of the spatial structure to guide vehicle reconstruction. The more comprehensive knowledge distilled from the CLIP big model based on the similarity between the paired/unpaired vehicle image-text sample is further taken into consideration to help achieve a better understanding of vehicles. A large-scale dataset is built to pre-train our model, termed Autobot1M, which contains about 1M vehicle images and 12693 text information. Extensive experiments on four vehicle-based downstream tasks fully validated the effectiveness of our VehicleMAE. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VehicleMAE.

Video-based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification with Auxiliary Samples

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to match persons captured by visible and infrared cameras, allowing person retrieval and tracking in 24-hour surveillance systems. Previous methods focus on learning from cross-modality person images in different cameras. However, temporal information and single-camera samples tend to be neglected. To crack this nut, in this paper, we first contribute a large-scale VI-ReID dataset named BUPTCampus. Different from most existing VI-ReID datasets, it 1) collects tracklets instead of images to introduce rich temporal information, 2) contains pixel-aligned cross-modality sample pairs for better modality-invariant learning, 3) provides one auxiliary set to help enhance the optimization, in which each identity only appears in a single camera. Based on our constructed dataset, we present a two-stream framework as baseline and apply Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to narrow the gap between the two modalities. To exploit the advantages introduced by the auxiliary set, we propose a curriculum learning based strategy to jointly learn from both primary and auxiliary sets. Moreover, we design a novel temporal k-reciprocal re-ranking method to refine the ranking list with fine-grained temporal correlation cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We also reproduce 9 state-of-the-art image-based and video-based VI-ReID methods on BUPTCampus and our methods show substantial superiority to them. The codes and dataset are available at: https://github.com/dyhBUPT/BUPTCampus.