Events Calendar

PhD Thesis Defense - Gozde Sahin

PhD Thesis Defense - Gozde Sahin

Title: Towards More Occlusion-Robust Deep Visual Object Tracking

Committee Members: Prof. Laurent Itti (chair), Prof. Ulrich Neumann, Prof. Keith Jenkins

Abstract: Visual object tracking (VOT) is considered as one of the principal challenges in computer vision, where a target given in the first frame is tracked in the rest of the video. Major challenges in VOT include factors such as rotations, deformations, illumination changes, and occlusions. With the widespread use of deep learning models with strong representative power, trackers have evolved to better handle the changes in the targets appearance due to factors like rotations and deformations. Meanwhile, robustness to occlusions has not been as widely studied for deep trackers and occlusion representation in VOT datasets has stayed low over the years.

In this work, we focus on occlusions in deep visual object tracking and examine whether realistic occlusion data and annotations can help with development and evaluation of more occlusion-robust trackers. First, we propose a multi-task occlusion learning framework to show how much occlusion labels in current datasets can help improve tracker performance in occluded frames. We discover that lack of representation in VOT datasets creates a barrier for developing and evaluating trackers that focus on occlusions. To address occlusions in visual tracking more directly, we create a large video benchmark for visual object tracking: The Heavy Occlusions in Object Tracking (HOOT) Benchmark. HOOT is specifically tailored for evaluation, analysis and development of occlusion-robust trackers with its extensive occlusion annotations. Finally, using the annotations in HOOT, we examine the effect of occlusions on template update and propose an occlusion-aware template update framework that improves the tracker performance under heavy occlusions.

Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa