Current state-of-the-art object tracking methods have largely benefited from the public availability of numerous benchmark datasets. However, the focus has been on open-air imagery and much less on underwater visual data. Inherent underwater distortions, such as color loss, poor contrast, and underexposure, caused by attenuation of light, refraction, and scattering, greatly affect the visual quality of underwater data, and as such, existing open-air trackers perform less efficiently on such data. To help bridge this gap, this article proposes a first comprehensive underwater object tracking (UOT100) benchmark dataset to facilitate the development of tracking algorithms well-suited for underwater environments. The proposed dataset consists of 104 underwater video sequences and more than 74 000 annotated frames derived from both natural and artificial underwater videos, with great varieties of distortions. We benchmark the performance of 20 state-of-the-art object tracking algorithms and further introduce a cascaded residual network for underwater image enhancement model to improve tracking accuracy and success rate of trackers. Our experimental results demonstrate the shortcomings of existing tracking algorithms on underwater data and how our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based enhancement model can be used to improve tracking performance. We also evaluate the visual quality of our model's output against existing GAN-based methods using well-accepted quality metrics and demonstrate that our model yields better visual data. Index Terms-Underwater benchmark dataset, underwater generative adversarial network (GAN), underwater image enhancement (UIE), underwater object tracking (UOT).
The concept of searching and localizing vehicles from live traffic videos based on descriptive textual input has yet to be explored in the scholarly literature. Endowing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) with such a capability could help solve crimes on roadways. One major impediment to the advancement of fine-grain vehicle recognition models is the lack of video testbench datasets with annotated ground truth data. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, no metrics currently exist for evaluating the robustness and performance efficiency of a vehicle recognition model on live videos and even less so for vehicle search and localization models. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing V-Localize, a novel artificial intelligence framework for vehicle search and continuous localization captured from live traffic videos based on input textual descriptions. An efficient hashgraph algorithm is introduced to compute valid target information from textual input. This work further introduces two novel datasets to advance AI research in these challenging areas. These datasets include (a) the most diverse and large-scale Vehicle Color Recognition (VCoR) dataset with 15 color classes鈥攖wice as many as the number of color classes in the largest existing such dataset鈥攖o facilitate finer-grain recognition with color information; and (b) a Vehicle Recognition in Video (VRiV) dataset, a first of its kind video testbench dataset for evaluating the performance of vehicle recognition models in live videos rather than still image data. The VRiV dataset will open new avenues for AI researchers to investigate innovative approaches that were previously intractable due to the lack of annotated traffic vehicle recognition video testbench dataset. Finally, to address the gap in the field, five novel metrics are introduced in this paper for adequately accessing the performance of vehicle recognition models in live videos. Ultimately, the proposed metrics could also prove intuitively effective at quantitative model evaluation in other video recognition applications. T One major advantage of the proposed vehicle search and continuous localization framework is that it could be integrated in ITS software solution to aid law enforcement, especially in critical cases such as of amber alerts or hit-and-run incidents.
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