Tracking by natural language specification is a new rising research topic that aims at locating the target object in the video sequence based on its language description. Compared with traditional bounding box (BBox) based tracking, this setting guides object tracking with high-level semantic information, addresses the ambiguity of BBox, and links local and global search organically together. Those benefits may bring more flexible, robust and accurate tracking performance in practical scenarios. However, existing natural language initialized trackers are developed and compared on benchmark datasets proposed for tracking-by-BBox, which can't reflect the true power of tracking-by-language. In this work, we propose a new benchmark specifically dedicated to the tracking-by-language, including a large scale dataset, strong and diverse baseline methods. Specifically, we collect 2k video sequences (contains a total of 1,244,340 frames, 663 words) and split 1300/700 for the train/testing respectively. We densely annotate one sentence in English and corresponding bounding boxes of the target object for each video. We also introduce two new challenges into TNL2K for the object tracking task, i.e., adversarial samples and modality switch. A strong baseline method based on an adaptive local-global-search scheme is proposed for future works to compare. We believe this benchmark will greatly boost related researches on natural language guided tracking.

本文提出了一种新的基于自然语言描述的目标跟踪方法，通过建立一个自然语言驱动的跟踪器的基准测试数据集，并提出了两个新的挑战来促进相关研究，旨在提高跟踪性能的灵活性、鲁棒性和准确性。

自然语言驱动下更加灵活精准的目标跟踪：算法与基准评估