Multiple object tracking (MOT), a popular subject in computer vision with broad application areas, aims to detect and track multiple objects across an input video. However, recent learning-based MOT methods require strong supervision on both the bounding box and the ID of each object for every frame used during training, which induces a heightened cost for obtaining labeled data. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised MOT framework that enables the accurate tracking of multiple objects while being trained without object ID ground truth labels. Our model is trained only with the bounding box information with a novel masked warping loss that drives the network to indirectly learn how to track objects through a video. Specifically, valid object center points in the current frame are warped with the predicted offset vector and enforced to be equal to the valid object center points in the previous frame. With this approach, we obtain an MOT accuracy on par with those of the state-of-the-art fully supervised MOT models, which use both the bounding boxes and object ID as ground truth labels, on the MOT17 dataset.

We propose an image aesthetic quality assessment algorithm, which considers personal taste in addition to generally perceived preference. This problem is formulated by a combination of two different learning frameworks based on support vector machines-Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Ranking SVM (R-SVM), where SVR learns a general model based on public datasets and R-SVM adjusts the model to accommodate personal preference obtained from user interactions. The combined framework, called R-SVR, is represented by a single objective function, which is optimized jointly to learn a model for personalized image aesthetic quality assessment. For the optimization, we use only a small subset of public dataset identified by k-nearest neighbor search instead of using all available training data. This strategy is useful in practice because it reduces training time significantly and alleviates data imbalance problem between regression and ranking. The proposed algorithm is tested through simulation and user study, and we present that our interactive learning algorithm by R-SVR is effective to increase user's satisfaction and improve prediction performance.

We propose an online tracking algorithm that adaptively models target appearances based on an online gradient boosting decision tree. Our algorithm is particularly useful for non-rigid and/or articulated objects since it handles various deformations of the target effectively by integrating a classifier operating on individual patches and provides segmentation masks of the target as final results. The posterior of the target state is propagated over time by particle filtering, where the likelihood is computed based mainly on patch-level confidence map associated with a latent target state corresponding to each sample. Once tracking is completed in each frame, our gradient boosting decision tree is updated to adapt new data in a recursive manner. For effective evaluation of segmentation-based tracking algorithms, we construct a new ground-truth that contains pixel-level annotation of segmentation mask. We evaluate the performance of our tracking algorithm based on the measures for segmentation masks, where our algorithm illustrates superior accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art segmentation-based tracking methods.