Recently, online shopping has gradually become a common way of shopping for people all over the world. Wonderful merchandise advertisements often attract more people to buy. These advertisements properly integrate multimodal multi-structured information of commodities, such as visual spatial information and fine-grained structure information. However, traditional multimodal text generation focuses on the conventional description of what existed and happened, which does not match the requirement of advertisement copywriting in the real world. Because advertisement copywriting has a vivid language style and higher requirements of faithfulness. Unfortunately, there is a lack of reusable evaluation frameworks and a scarcity of datasets. Therefore, we present a dataset, E-MMAD (e-commercial multimodal multi-structured advertisement copywriting), which requires, and supports much more detailed information in text generation. Noticeably, it is one of the largest video captioning datasets in this field. Accordingly, we propose a baseline method and faithfulness evaluation metric on the strength of structured information reasoning to solve the demand in reality on this dataset. It surpasses the previous methods by a large margin on all metrics. The dataset and method are coming soon on \url{https://e-mmad.github.io/e-mmad.net/index.html}.
We introduce a novel backbone architecture to improve target-perception ability of feature representation for tracking. Specifically, having observed that de facto frameworks perform feature matching simply using the outputs from backbone for target localization, there is no direct feedback from the matching module to the backbone network, especially the shallow layers. More concretely, only the matching module can directly access the target information (in the reference frame), while the representation learning of candidate frame is blind to the reference target. As a consequence, the accumulation effect of target-irrelevant interference in the shallow stages may degrade the feature quality of deeper layers. In this paper, we approach the problem from a different angle by conducting multiple branch-wise interactions inside the Siamese-like backbone networks (InBN). At the core of InBN is a general interaction modeler (GIM) that injects the prior knowledge of reference image to different stages of the backbone network, leading to better target-perception and robust distractor-resistance of candidate feature representation with negligible computation cost. The proposed GIM module and InBN mechanism are general and applicable to different backbone types including CNN and Transformer for improvements, as evidenced by our extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks. In particular, the CNN version (based on SiamCAR) improves the baseline with 3.2/6.9 absolute gains of SUC on LaSOT/TNL2K, respectively. The Transformer version obtains SUC scores of 65.7/52.0 on LaSOT/TNL2K, which are on par with recent state of the arts. Code and models will be released.
Different from visible cameras which record intensity images frame by frame, the biologically inspired event camera produces a stream of asynchronous and sparse events with much lower latency. In practice, the visible cameras can better perceive texture details and slow motion, while event cameras can be free from motion blurs and have a larger dynamic range which enables them to work well under fast motion and low illumination. Therefore, the two sensors can cooperate with each other to achieve more reliable object tracking. In this work, we propose a large-scale Visible-Event benchmark (termed VisEvent) due to the lack of a realistic and scaled dataset for this task. Our dataset consists of 820 video pairs captured under low illumination, high speed, and background clutter scenarios, and it is divided into a training and a testing subset, each of which contains 500 and 320 videos, respectively. Based on VisEvent, we transform the event flows into event images and construct more than 30 baseline methods by extending current single-modality trackers into dual-modality versions. More importantly, we further build a simple but effective tracking algorithm by proposing a cross-modality transformer, to achieve more effective feature fusion between visible and event data. Extensive experiments on the proposed VisEvent dataset, and two simulated datasets (i.e., OTB-DVS and VOT-DVS), validated the effectiveness of our model. The dataset and source code will be available at our project page: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/viseventtrack/}.
Siamese tracking has achieved groundbreaking performance in recent years, where the essence is the efficient matching operator cross-correlation and its variants. Besides the remarkable success, it is important to note that the heuristic matching network design relies heavily on expert experience. Moreover, we experimentally find that one sole matching operator is difficult to guarantee stable tracking in all challenging environments. Thus, in this work, we introduce six novel matching operators from the perspective of feature fusion instead of explicit similarity learning, namely Concatenation, Pointwise-Addition, Pairwise-Relation, FiLM, Simple-Transformer and Transductive-Guidance, to explore more feasibility on matching operator selection. The analyses reveal these operators' selective adaptability on different environment degradation types, which inspires us to combine them to explore complementary features. To this end, we propose binary channel manipulation (BCM) to search for the optimal combination of these operators. BCM determines to retrain or discard one operator by learning its contribution to other tracking steps. By inserting the learned matching networks to a strong baseline tracker Ocean, our model achieves favorable gains by $67.2 \rightarrow 71.4$, $52.6 \rightarrow 58.3$, $70.3 \rightarrow 76.0$ success on OTB100, LaSOT, and TrackingNet, respectively. Notably, Our tracker, dubbed AutoMatch, uses less than half of training data/time than the baseline tracker, and runs at 50 FPS using PyTorch. Code and model will be released at https://github.com/JudasDie/SOTS.
Super-resolution (SR) is a fundamental and representative task of low-level vision area. It is generally thought that the features extracted from the SR network have no specific semantic information, and the network simply learns complex non-linear mappings from input to output. Can we find any "semantics" in SR networks? In this paper, we give affirmative answers to this question. By analyzing the feature representations with dimensionality reduction and visualization, we successfully discover the deep semantic representations in SR networks, \textit{i.e.}, deep degradation representations (DDR), which relate to the image degradation types and degrees. We also reveal the differences in representation semantics between classification and SR networks. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we draw a series of observations and conclusions, which are of great significance for future work, such as interpreting the intrinsic mechanisms of low-level CNN networks and developing new evaluation approaches for blind SR.
The one-shot multi-object tracking, which integrates object detection and ID embedding extraction into a unified network, has achieved groundbreaking results in recent years. However, current one-shot trackers solely rely on single-frame detections to predict candidate bounding boxes, which may be unreliable when facing disastrous visual degradation, e.g., motion blur, occlusions. Once a target bounding box is mistakenly classified as background by the detector, the temporal consistency of its corresponding tracklet will be no longer maintained, as shown in Fig. 1. In this paper, we set out to restore the misclassified bounding boxes, i.e., fake background, by proposing a re-check network. The re-check network propagates previous tracklets to the current frame by exploring the relation between cross-frame temporal cues and current candidates using the modified cross-correlation layer. The propagation results help to reload the "fake background" and eventually repair the broken tracklets. By inserting the re-check network to a strong baseline tracker CSTrack (a variant of JDE), our model achieves favorable gains by $70.7 \rightarrow 76.7$, $70.6 \rightarrow 76.3$ MOTA on MOT16 and MOT17, respectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/JudasDie/SOTS.
Tracking by natural language specification is a new rising research topic that aims at locating the target object in the video sequence based on its language description. Compared with traditional bounding box (BBox) based tracking, this setting guides object tracking with high-level semantic information, addresses the ambiguity of BBox, and links local and global search organically together. Those benefits may bring more flexible, robust and accurate tracking performance in practical scenarios. However, existing natural language initialized trackers are developed and compared on benchmark datasets proposed for tracking-by-BBox, which can't reflect the true power of tracking-by-language. In this work, we propose a new benchmark specifically dedicated to the tracking-by-language, including a large scale dataset, strong and diverse baseline methods. Specifically, we collect 2k video sequences (contains a total of 1,244,340 frames, 663 words) and split 1300/700 for the train/testing respectively. We densely annotate one sentence in English and corresponding bounding boxes of the target object for each video. We also introduce two new challenges into TNL2K for the object tracking task, i.e., adversarial samples and modality switch. A strong baseline method based on an adaptive local-global-search scheme is proposed for future works to compare. We believe this benchmark will greatly boost related researches on natural language guided tracking.
Due to balanced accuracy and speed, joint learning detection and ReID-based one-shot models have drawn great attention in multi-object tracking(MOT). However, the differences between the above two tasks in the one-shot tracking paradigm are unconsciously overlooked, leading to inferior performance than the two-stage methods. In this paper, we dissect the reasoning process of the aforementioned two tasks. Our analysis reveals that the competition of them inevitably hurts the learning of task-dependent representations, which further impedes the tracking performance. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel cross-correlation network that can effectively impel the separate branches to learn task-dependent representations. Furthermore, we introduce a scale-aware attention network that learns discriminative embeddings to improve the ReID capability. We integrate the delicately designed networks into a one-shot online MOT system, dubbed CSTrack. Without bells and whistles, our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances on MOT16 and MOT17. We will release our code to facilitate further work.
The encoding of the target in object tracking moves from the coarse bounding-box to fine-grained segmentation map recently. Revisiting de facto real-time approaches that are capable of predicting mask during tracking, we observed that they usually fork a light branch from the backbone network for segmentation. Although efficient, directly fusing backbone features without considering the negative influence of background clutter tends to introduce false-negative predictions, lagging the segmentation accuracy. To mitigate this problem, we propose an attention retrieval network (ARN) to perform soft spatial constraints on backbone features. We first build a look-up-table (LUT) with the ground-truth mask in the starting frame, and then retrieves the LUT to obtain an attention map for spatial constraints. Moreover, we introduce a multi-resolution multi-stage segmentation network (MMS) to further weaken the influence of background clutter by reusing the predicted mask to filter backbone features. Our approach set a new state-of-the-art on recent pixel-wise object tracking benchmark VOT2020 while running at 40 fps. Notably, the proposed model surpasses SiamMask by 11.7/4.2/5.5 points on VOT2020, DAVIS2016, and DAVIS2017, respectively. We will release our code at https://github.com/researchmm/TracKit.