The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2019 is the seventh annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of 81 trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis as well as the standard VOT methodology for long-term tracking analysis. The VOT2019 challenge was composed of five challenges focusing on different tracking domains: (i) VOT-ST2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB, (ii) VOT-RT2019 challenge focused on "real-time" shortterm tracking in RGB, (iii) VOT-LT2019 focused on longterm tracking namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. Two new challenges have been introduced: (iv) VOT-RGBT2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB and thermal imagery and (v) VOT-RGBD2019 challenge focused on long-term tracking in RGB and depth imagery. The VOT-ST2019, VOT-RT2019 and VOT-LT2019 datasets were refreshed while new datasets were introduced for VOT-RGBT2019 and VOT-RGBD2019. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard shortterm, long-term tracking and tracking with multi-channel imagery. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website 1 .

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The Thermal Infrared Visual Object Tracking challenge 2015, VOT-TIR2015, aims at comparing short-term singleobject visual trackers that work on thermal infrared (TIR) sequences and do not apply pre-learned models of object appearance. VOT-TIR2015 is the first benchmark on shortterm tracking in TIR sequences. Results of 24 trackers are presented. For each participating tracker, a short description is provided in the appendix. The VOT-TIR2015 challenge is based on the VOT2013 challenge, but introduces the following novelties: (i) the newly collected LTIR (Linköping TIR) dataset is used, (ii) the VOT2013 attributes are adapted to TIR data, (iii) the evaluation is performed using insights gained during VOT2013 and VOT2014 and is similar to VOT2015.

Short-term single-object (STSO) tracking in thermal images is a challenging problem relevant in a growing number of applications. In order to evaluate STSO tracking algorithms on visual imagery, there are de facto standard benchmarks. However, we argue that tracking in thermal imagery is different than in visual imagery, and that a separate benchmark is needed. The available thermal infrared datasets are few and the existing ones are not challenging for modern tracking algorithms. Therefore, we hereby propose a thermal infrared benchmark according to the Visual Visual Object Tracking (VOT) protocol for evaluation of STSO tracking methods. The benchmark includes the new LTIR dataset containing 20 thermal image sequences which have been collected from multiple sources and annotated in the format used in the VOT Challenge. In addition, we show that the ranking of different tracking principles differ between the visual and thermal benchmarks, confirming the need for the new benchmark.