Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Dongming Wu, Wencheng Han, Tiancai Wang, Xingping Dong, Xiangyu Zhang, Jianbing Shen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 14633-14642

Existing referring understanding tasks tend to involve the detection of a single text-referred object. In this paper, we propose a new and general referring understanding task, termed referring multi-object tracking (RMOT). Its core idea is to employ a language expression as a semantic cue to guide the prediction of multi-object tracking. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to achieve an arbitrary number of referent object predictions in videos. To push forward RMOT, we construct one benchmark with scalable expressions based on KITTI, named Refer-KITTI. Specifically, it provides 18 videos with 818 expressions, and each expression in a video is annotated with an average of 10.7 objects. Further, we develop a transformer-based architecture TransRMOT to tackle the new task in an online manner, which achieves impressive detection performance and outperforms other counterparts. The Refer-KITTI dataset and the code are released at https://referringmot.github.io.