VisDrone-MOT2021: The Vision Meets Drone Multiple Object Tracking Challenge Results

Vision Meets Drone: Multiple Object Tracking (VisDrone-MOT2021) challenge – the forth annual activity organized by the VisDrone team – focuses on benchmarking UAV MOT algorithms in realistic challenging environments. It is held in conjunction with ICCV 2021. VisDrone-MOT2021 contains 96 video sequences in total, including 56 sequences (~24K frames) for training, 7 sequences (∼3K frames) for validation and 33 sequences (~13K frames) for testing. Bounding-box annotations for novel object categories are provided every frame and temporally consistent instance IDs are also given. Additionally, occlusion ratio and truncation ratio are provided as extra useful annotations. The results of eight state-of-the-art MOT algorithms are reported and discussed. We hope that our VisDrone-MOT2021 challenge will facilitate future research and applications in the field of UAV vision. The website of our challenge can be found at http://www.aiskyeye.com/.

1. Introduction

In recent years, UAV swarm has raised a lot of research interests due to its wide applications, as well as challenges and characteristics in system complexity, flexibility and scalability, and robustness [21]. As a crucial step for drones to emerge intelligence, smart perception of the environment heavily relies on UAV vision. Multi-object tracking (MOT) – identify and track object instances in video sequences – is one of the most critical functions of UAV vision.