Parallelization of the Honeybee Search Algorithm for Object Tracking

SiamCAM: A Real-Time Siamese Network for Object Tracking with Compensating Attention Mechanism

The Siamese-based object tracking algorithm regards tracking as a similarity matching problem. It determines the object location according to the response value of the object template to the search template. When there is similar object interference in complex scenes, it is easy to cause tracking drift. We propose a real-time Siamese network object tracking algorithm combined with a compensating attention mechanism to solve this problem. Firstly, the attention mechanism is introduced in the feature extraction module of the template branch and search branch of the Siamese network to improve the feature representation of the network to the object. The attention mechanism of the search branch enhances the feature representation of both the target and the similar backgrounds simultaneously. Therefore, based on the above two-branch attention, we propose a compensated attention model, which introduces the attention selected by the template branch into the search branch, and improves the discriminative ability of the search branch to the object by using the feature attention weighting of the template branch to the object. Experimental results on three popular benchmarks, including OTB2015, VOT2018, and LaSOT, show that the accuracy and robustness of the algorithm in this paper are adequate. It improved occlusion cases, similar object interference, and high-speed motion. The processing speed on GPU reaches 47 fps, which can achieve real-time object tracking.

Design of a Low-Power Embedded System Based on a SoC-FPGA and the Honeybee Search Algorithm for Real-Time Video Tracking

Video tracking involves detecting previously designated objects of interest within a sequence of image frames. It can be applied in robotics, unmanned vehicles, and automation, among other fields of interest. Video tracking is still regarded as an open problem due to a number of obstacles that still need to be overcome, including the need for high precision and real-time results, as well as portability and low-power demands. This work presents the design, implementation and assessment of a low-power embedded system based on an SoC-FPGA platform and the honeybee search algorithm (HSA) for real-time video tracking. HSA is a meta-heuristic that combines evolutionary computing and swarm intelligence techniques. Our findings demonstrated that the combination of SoC-FPGA and HSA reduced the consumption of computational resources, allowing real-time multiprocessing without a reduction in precision, and with the advantage of lower power consumption, which enabled portability. A starker difference was observed when measuring the power consumption. The proposed SoC-FPGA system consumed about 5 Watts, whereas the CPU-GPU system required more than 200 Watts. A general recommendation obtained from this research is to use SoC-FPGA over CPU-GPU to work with meta-heuristics in computer vision applications when an embedded solution is required.

Leaf Disease Segmentation and Detection in Apple Orchards for Precise Smart Spraying in Sustainable Agriculture

Reduction in chemical usage for crop management due to the environmental and health issues is a key area in achieving sustainable agricultural practices. One area in which this can be achieved is through the development of intelligent spraying systems which can identify the target for example crop disease or weeds allowing for precise spraying reducing chemical usage. Artificial intelligence and computer vision has the potential to be applied for the precise detection and classification of crops. In this paper, a study is presented that uses instance segmentation for the task of leaf and rust disease detection in apple orchards using Mask R-CNN. Three different Mask R-CNN network backbones (ResNet-50, MobileNetV3-Large and MobileNetV3-Large-Mobile) are trained and evaluated for the tasks of object detection, segmentation and disease detection. Segmentation masks on a subset of the Plant Pathology Challenge 2020 database are annotated by the authors, and these are used for the training and evaluation of the proposed Mask R-CNN based models. The study highlights that a Mask R-CNN model with a ResNet-50 backbone provides good accuracy for the task, particularly in the detection of very small rust disease objects on the leaves.

SAFS: Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Self-Adaptive Feature Selection

Object tracking is one of the most challenging problems in the field of computer vision. In challenging object tracking scenarios such as illumination variation, occlusion, motion blur and fast motion, existing algorithms can present decreased performances. To make better use of the various features of the image, we propose an object tracking method based on the self-adaptive feature selection (SAFS) algorithm, which can select the most distinguishable feature sub-template to guide the tracking task. The similarity of each feature sub-template can be calculated by the histogram of the features. Then, the distinguishability of the feature sub-template can be measured by their similarity matrix based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP). The selection task of the feature sub-template is transformed into the classification task between feature vectors by the above process and adopt modified Jeffreys' entropy as the discriminant metric for classification, which can complete the update of the sub-template. Experiments with the eight video sequences in the Visual Tracker Benchmark dataset evaluate the comprehensive performance of SAFS and compare them with five baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that SAFS can overcome the difficulties caused by scene changes and achieve robust object tracking.