Rethinking Generic Object Tracking Toward Human-Level Perceptual Intelligence
For computer vision researchers, this work advances generic object tracking toward human-level perceptual intelligence by systematically improving model generalization and online adaptation.
This dissertation addresses the gap between machine visual tracking and human-level perception by proposing methods to enhance target discrimination, robust adaptation, and geometric reasoning in generic object tracking, achieving improved performance under severe deformation, distractors, and unseen categories.
At the heart of human visual perception lies the ability to maintain a continuous and coherent understanding of the external world. By integrating observations with accumulated experience, the human visual system can continuously adapt to variations in both the target and its surrounding environment, while preserving robust visual continuity as scene dynamics evolve. Human vision can therefore integrate prior knowledge, spatial geometry, and semantic context to understand complex scenes and their changes. As a core problem in computer vision, visual object tracking aims to bring machine perception closer to human visual perception. These capabilities are central to the task of Generic Object Tracking (GOT). In this task, a visual tracker is initialized only with the bounding box of an arbitrarily specified target in the first frame, and must continuously localize the target in subsequent dynamic visual streams. However, future events, observations, and real-world variations are inherently unpredictable; therefore, the model's generalization and online adaptation capabilities remain bottlenecks. Tracking reliability can deteriorate when the target undergoes severe deformation, is affected by complex distractors, encounters significant environmental changes, or belongs to a category unseen during training. This dissertation aims to narrow the gap between machine visual tracking systems and human visual perception by proposing a series of methods that systematically enhance the target discrimination, robust adaptation, and geometric reasoning capabilities of tracking models.