Participate by submitting a paper

Scope of the solicited papers

  • Original or improved trackers as well as papers giving new insights into existing trackers or class of trackers (see below). Participation at VOT2019 challenge is required.
  • Novel ways of using and extending the VOT framework for tracker performance analysis.

Submission instructions for regular papers

Submission instructions for tracking papers not accepted to ICCV

High-quality tracking papers submitted (but not accepted) to ICCV2019 can be re-submitted to VOT2019. Rules are the same as for the regular submission process with some additions.

  • Include all review forms and the rebuttal letter as a single PDF document to your submission.
  • The re-submission should address the criticism and exposed flaws in your ICCV submitted paper to meet the requirements of the VOT workshop.
  • The submissions will be assessed by the VOT organizers based on the provided review forms and the rebuttal letter.

Participate by attending the VOT2019 subchallenges

VOT standard (VOT-ST2019) and realtime (VOT-RT2019) subchallenges

  • VOT-ST2019 and VOT-RT2019 address short-term, causal, model-free trackers. These trackers are required to report the target in every frame of the sequence.
  • The general requirements for the trackers submitted to these challenges are the same as in previous VOT challenges.
  • VOT-ST2019 will contain (1) reset-based experiment for accuracy/robustness/expected average overlap computation and (2) no-reset experiment to allow average overlap computation.
  • VOT-ST2019 dataset is refreshed version of the dataset from VOT-ST2018.
  • VOT-ST2019 winner will be determined on a separate sequestered dataset. The VOT committee will run trackers that obtain top performance on public dataset to determine the winner.
  • VOT-RT2019 will be run as one of the experiments of the VOT-ST2019.

VOT 2019 long-term subchallenge (VOT-LT2019)

  • VOT-LT2019 addresses long-term, causal, model-free trackers.
  • These trackers are required to determine the target disappearance (e.g., as the target leaves the field of view of undergoes a full occlusion) and re-detect the target once it re-enters the scene.
  • For the toolkit compatibility reasons, the tracker has to report the target position in each frame as well as a certainty score that the target is present (high for when the tracker believes the target is present and low/negative when the target is not present).
  • A dataset with many occurrences of target leaving and re-entering the field of view has been constructed (adaptation of the VOT-LT2018 subchallenge).

VOT 2019 RGB thermal and infrared subchallenge

  • VOT-RGBT2019 addresses short-term, causal, model-free trackers, i.e., the same kind of trackers as the VOT-ST2019 subchallenge.
  • The trackers work with a 4-channel input composed of RGB+thermal channels.
  • A completely new dataset has been constructed for this subchallenge.
  • The nature of RGB+T acquisition is such that the RGB and T channels are temporally fairly well synchronized for the most part, but in some frames the RGB and T modality will go out of sync. This results in slight misalignment between the target location in RGB and T channels. The ground truth is specified in the T-channel since this is the primary modality and the RGB channels are considered as an auxiliary modality. Thus the trackers are required to address the de-synchronization issue and output the target location as specified in the primary modality (T channel).

VOT 2019 RGB and depth subchallenge

  • VOT-RGBD2019 addresses long-term, causal, model-free trackers, i.e., the same kind of trackers as the VOT-LT2019 subchallenge.
  • The trackers work with a 4-channel input composed of RGB+depth channels.
  • A completely new dataset has been constructed for this challenge.
  • The guidelines for early start on integration and testing are available here. We included two test sequences (not part of the final dataset) to allow early integration and tracker testing – the toolkit will automatically download the sequences.
  • Care has been taken to accurately temporally synchronize and spatially align the RGB and Depth channels, resulting in nearly per-pixel accurate alignment between all channels.

Participation instructions

  • The most recent version of the VOT toolkit is required because of adaptation to RGBT/RGBD subchallenges and regular maintenance.
  • Follow this tutorial to download the toolkit and set up the environment to integrate your tracker into the toolkit. The toolkit will automatically download the dataset, alternatively you can download it here.

All trackers require integration via the TraX protocol. The guidelines for integrating TraX protocol directly are available here. Additionally a wrapper is also provided to simplify the integration for people that have used VOT toolkit in the past, check the integration examples in the VOT toolkit repository on how to use it.

  • Make sure that you select the correct experiment stack (votst2019 for VOT2019 main short-term subchallenge ; votlt2019 for VOT-LT2019 subchallenge ; votrgbt2019 for VOT-RGBT2019 subchallenge ; votrgbd2019 for VOT-RGBD2019 subchallenge) for the corresponding challenge. The VOT-realtime subchallenge is automatically run as one of the experiments of the main VOT-ST2019 subchallenge.
  • Follow this tutorial to run the experiments and correctly pack the results.
  • After packing the results submit them via the submission page.

Participation requirements

  • The real-time experiment requires running the tracker on a single machine (you can use multiple CPUs or GPU). Please, make sure that this is the hardware that you are using when running the tracker. Also, specify your hardware setup correctly when submitting the results.
  • Authors are required to help the VOT technical committee to reproduce their results. If the results cannot be reproduced by the VOT using the submitted code, the tracker will be removed from the paper.
  • The submission should contain all the results and the tracker code following several requirements that will enable us to automatically process the submission and re-produce the results:
    • ALL source code for the tracker must be included in the submission.
    • ALL dependencies (operating system, installed libraries, Matlab/Python version, etc.) must be stated in a README file.
    • There must be a single script to compile all binaries (called install.m (Matlab), or install.sh (others)).
    • There must be a runfile for the tracker, that the toolkit can call to execute it. (basically what the toolkit generates for each tracker)
    • In case tracker uses a GPU, provide the GPU and CPU version.
  • To counter attempts of intentionally reporting large bounding boxes to avoid resets, the VOT committee will analyze the submitted tracker outputs. If such or similar strategies are detected, the committee reserves the right to disqualify the tracker.
  • Authors are encouraged to submit their own previously published trackers.
  • Authors may submit modified versions of third-party trackers. The submission description should clearly state what the changes were. Third-party trackers submitted without significant modification will not be accepted.

Subchallenge winner requirements

  • Top performance on the corresponding subchallenge.
  • The tracker should obey the following learning restrictions:
    • OTB, VOT, ALOV, UAV123, NUSPRO, TempleColor, RGBT234 (or datasets with parts of it, e.g. RGBT210) are NOT allowed to be used in learning.
    • Most part of GOT10k CAN be used for learning, except from its (1) test set, (2) validation set and (3) the 1k sequences specified in the following list.
    • The use of class labels specific to VOT is not allowed (i.e., identifying a target class in each sequence and applying pretrained class-specific trackers is not allowed).
  • Agreement to publish the code online at VOT page is required.

Questions regarding the VOT2019 challenge should be directed to [the VOT committee](mailto:gustavojavier.fernandez@ait.ac.at;matej.kristan@fri.uni-lj.si?subject=VOT2019 question). If you have general technical questions regarding the VOT toolkit, first consult the FAQ page and the VOT support forum.