Planar object tracking benchmark in the wild

Planar object tracking is an important problem in vision-based robotic systems. Several benchmarks have been constructed to evaluate the tracking algorithms. However, these benchmarks are built in constrained laboratory environments and there is a lack of video sequences captured in the wild to investigate the effectiveness of trackers in practical applications. In this paper, we present a carefully designed planar object tracking benchmark containing 280 videos of 40 planar objects sampled in the natural environment. In particular, for each object, we shoot seven videos involving various challenging factors, namely scale change, rotation, perspective distortion, motion blur, occlusion, out-of-view, and unconstrained. In addition, we design a semi-manual approach to annotate the ground truth with high quality. Moreover, 22 representative algorithms are evaluated on the benchmark using two evaluation metrics. Detailed analysis of the evaluation results is also presented to provide guidance on designing algorithms working in real-world scenarios. We expect that the proposed benchmark would benefit future studies on planar object tracking. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.