VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Tracking

In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, dubbed VastTrack, towards facilitating the development of more general visual tracking via encompassing abundant classes and videos. VastTrack possesses several attractive properties: (1) Vast Object Category. In particular, it covers target objects from 2,115 classes, largely surpassing object categories of existing popular benchmarks (e.g., GOT-10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). With such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking. (2) Larger scale. Compared with current benchmarks, VastTrack offers 50,610 sequences with 4.2 million frames, which makes it to date the largest benchmark regarding the number of videos, and thus could benefit training even more powerful visual trackers in the deep learning era. (3) Rich Annotation. Besides conventional bounding box annotations, VastTrack also provides linguistic descriptions for the videos. The rich annotations of VastTrack enables development of both the vision-only and the vision-language tracking. To ensure precise annotation, all videos are manually labeled with multiple rounds of careful inspection and refinement. To understand performance of existing trackers and to provide baselines for future comparison, we extensively assess 25 representative trackers. The results, not surprisingly, show significant drops compared to those on current datasets due to lack of abundant categories and videos from diverse scenarios for training, and more efforts are required to improve general tracking. Our VastTrack and all the evaluation results will be made publicly available https://github.com/HengLan/VastTrack.