Filling the gap in quality assessment of video object tracking

Current evaluation methods either rely heavily on reference information manually annotated or, by completely avoiding human input, provide only a rough evaluation of the performance of video object tracking algorithms. The main objective of this paper is to present a novel approach to the problem of evaluating video object tracking algorithms. It is proposed the use different types of reference information and the combination of heterogeneous metrics for the purpose of approximating the ideal error. This will enable a significant decrease of the required reference information, thus bridging the gap between metrics with different requirements concerning this type of data. As a result, evaluation frameworks can aggregate the benefits from individual approaches while overcoming their weaknesses, providing a flexible and powerful tool to assess and characterize the behavior of the tracking algorithms.

► We propose an approach to facilitate the evaluation of tracking algorithms.
► We aim to complement existent metrics and unify the use of reference information.
► We analyze the combination of different types of ground truth and metrics.
► Combining ground truth and metrics requires less reference information.
► The ideal error can be approximated with less effort in ground truth generation.