Cannot See the Forest for the Trees: Aggregating Multiple Viewpoints to Better Classify Objects in Videos

Recently, both long-tailed recognition and object tracking have made great advances individually. TAO benchmark presented a mixture of the two, long-tailed object tracking, in order to further reflect the aspect of the real-world. To date, existing solutions have adopted detectors showing robustness in long-tailed distributions, which derive per-frame results. Then, they used tracking algorithms that combine the temporally independent detections to finalize tracklets. However, as the approaches did not take temporal changes in scenes into account, inconsistent classification results in videos led to low overall performance. In this paper, we present a set classifier that improves accuracy of classifying tracklets by aggregating information from multiple viewpoints contained in a tracklet. To cope with sparse annotations in videos, we further propose augmentation of tracklets that can maximize data efficiency. The set classifier is plug-and-playable to existing object trackers, and highly improves the performance of long-tailed object tracking. By simply attaching our method to QDTrack on top of ResNet-101, we achieve the new state-of-the-art, 19.9% and 15.7% $TrackAP_{50}$ on TAO validation and test sets, respectively. Our code is available at this link11https://github.com/sukjunhwang/setclassifier.