Tracking with natural-language (NL) specification is a powerful new paradigm to yield trackers that initialize without a manuallyspecified bounding box, stay on target in spite of occlusions, and auto-recover when diverged. These advantages stem in part from visual appearance and NL having distinct and complementary invariance properties. However, realizing these advantages is technically challenging: the two modalities have incompatible representations. In this paper, we present the first practical and competitive solution to the challenge of tracking with NL specification. Our first novelty is an NL region proposal network (NL-RPN) that transforms an NL description into a convolutional kernel and shares the search branch with siamese trackers; the combined network can be trained end-to-end. Secondly, we propose a novel formulation to represent the history of past visual exemplars and use those exemplars to automatically reset the tracker together with our NL-RPN. Empirical results over tracking benchmarks with NL annotations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Abstract. Accurate video-based ball tracking in team sports is important for automated game analysis, and has proven very difficult because the ball is often occluded by the players. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to addressing this issue by formulating the tracking in terms of deciding which player, if any, M is in possession of the ball at any given time. This is very different from standard approaches that first attempt to track the ball and only then to assign possession. We will show that our method substantially increases performance when applied to long basketball and soccer sequences.

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