Title: Tracking by Animation: Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Object Attentive Trackers,
Abstract: Online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) from videos is a challenging computer
vision task which has been extensively studied for decades. Most of the
existing MOT algorithms are based on the Tracking-by-Detection (TBD) paradigm
combined with popular machine learning approaches which largely reduce the
human effort to tune algorithm parameters. However, the commonly used
supervised learning approaches require the labeled data (e.g., bounding boxes),
which is expensive for videos. Also, the TBD framework is usually suboptimal
since it is not end-to-end, i.e., it considers the task as detection and
tracking, but not jointly. To achieve both label-free and end-to-end learning
of MOT, we propose a Tracking-by-Animation framework, where a differentiable
neural model first tracks objects from input frames and then animates these
objects into reconstructed frames. Learning is then driven by the
reconstruction error through backpropagation. We further propose a
Reprioritized Attentive Tracking to improve the robustness of data association.
Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real video datasets show the
potential of the proposed model.