Finding the Best from the Second Bests - Inhibiting Subjective Bias in Evaluation of Visual Tracking Algorithms

Yu Pang, Haibin Ling; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 2784-2791

Evaluating visual tracking algorithms, or "trackers" for short, is of great importance in computer vision. However, it is hard to "fairly" compare trackers due to many parameters need to be tuned in the experimental configurations. On the other hand, when introducing a new tracker, a recent trend is to validate it by comparing it with several existing ones. Such an evaluation may have subjective biases towards the new tracker which typically performs the best. This is mainly due to the difficulty to optimally tune all its competitors and sometimes the selected testing sequences. By contrast, little subjective bias exists towards the "second best" ones 1 in the contest. This observation inspires us with a novel perspective towards inhibiting subjective bias in evaluating trackers by analyzing the results between the second bests. In particular, we first collect all tracking papers published in major computer vision venues in recent years. From these papers, after filtering out potential biases in various aspects, we create a dataset containing many records of comparison results between various visual trackers. Using these records, we derive performance rankings of the involved trackers by four different methods. The first two methods model the dataset as a graph and then derive the rankings over the graph, one by a rank aggregation algorithm and the other by a PageRank-like solution. The other two methods take the records as generated from sports contests and adopt widely used Elo's and Glicko's rating systems to derive the rankings. The experimental results are presented and may serve as a reference for related research.