Transparent Object Tracking with Enhanced Fusion Module

Abstract: Accurate tracking of transparent objects, such as glasses, plays a critical role in many robotic tasks such as robot-assisted living. Due to the adaptive and often reflective texture of such objects, traditional tracking algorithms that rely on general-purpose learned features suffer from reduced performance. Recent research has proposed to instill transparency awareness into existing general object trackers by fusing purpose-built features. However, with the existing fusion techniques, the addition of new features causes a change in the latent space making it impossible to incorporate transparency awareness on trackers with fixed latent spaces. For example, many of the current days transformer-based trackers are fully pre-trained and are sensitive to any latent space perturbations. In this paper, we present a new feature fusion technique that integrates transparency information into a fixed feature space, enabling its use in a broader range of trackers. Our proposed fusion module, composed of a transformer encoder and an MLP module, leverages key query-based transformations to embed the transparency information into the tracking pipeline. We also present a new two-step training strategy for our fusion module to effectively merge transparency features. We propose a new tracker architecture that uses our fusion techniques to achieve superior results for transparent object tracking. Our proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art trackers on TOTB, which is the largest transparent object tracking benchmark recently released. Our results and the implementation of code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kalyan0510/TOTEM.