Participation steps

• Follow the guidelines to integrate your tracker with the new VOT toolkit and run the experiments.
• Register your tracker on the evaluation server page, fill-out the tracker description questionnaire and submit the tracker description documents: a short description for the results paper and a longer description (see explanations below).
• Once registered, submit the output produced by the toolkit (see toolkit tutorial) to the evaluation server (this current page). Do not forget to pack the results with the vot pack command.
• Receive performance scores via email.

Result submission

Follow https://votchallenge.net/howto/overview.html for how to create your submission. Do not forget to pack the results with the vot pack command.

Make sure that in the tracker identifier in the manifest.yml (by default is inside the output zip file) match with the tracker short name you register through our Google Form.

Then submit your zip file in Participate tab.

Important note

• Successful submission will resulted in a FINISHED message, and you will receive an email about the results of submission shortly after.
• For each submission, the evaluation will run for roughly 45 minutes to 1 hours and 30 minutes, sometimes it can take even longer depends on server loads. To avoid bottlenecking the server, you should try to submit earlier, especially when the deadline is close.
• After 10 succesful submissions (meaning necessary files are submitted, input structure of your zip file is correct, etc) you will not receive evaluation results for any of your submission after that.
• Each succesful submission needs to be at least 24h apart from each other to mitigate overfitting attempts.
• Each submission that resulted in an error will not be count toward the limit of 10 succesful submissions.

Additional clarifications

• The short tracker description should contain a concise description (LaTeX format) for the VOT results paper appendix (see examples in Appendix of a VOT results papers). The longer description will be used by the VOTS TC for result interpretation. Write the descriptions in advance to speed up the submission process.
• Results for a single registered tracker may be submitted to the evaluation server at most 10 times. In response to submissions >10, an email with Subject “Maximum number of VOTS submissions reached” will be sent to avoid confusion about the situation. Registering a slightly modified tracker to increase the number of server evaluations is prohibited. The VOTS committee reserves the discretion to disqualify trackers that violate this constraint. If in doubt whether a modification is “slight”, contact the VOTS committee.
• When coauthoring multiple submissions with similar design, the longer description should refer to the other submissions and clearly expose the differences. If in doubt whether a change is sufficient enough, contact the organisers.
• Authors are encouraged to submit their own previously published or unpublished trackers.
• Authors may submit modified versions of third-party trackers. The submission description should clearly state what the changes were. Third-party trackers submitted without significant modification will not be accepted.

FAQ

• Does the number of targets change during tracking?

  All targets in the sequence are specified in the first frame. During tracking, some targets may disappear and possibly reappear later. The number of targets is different from sequence to sequence.

• Can I participate with a single-target tracker?

  Sure, with a slight adjustment. You will write a wrapper that creates several independent tracker instances, each tracking one of the targets. To the toolkit, your tracker will be a multi-target tracker, while internally, you’re running independent trackers. See the example here.

• Can I participate with a bounding box tracker?

  Sure, with a slight extension. In previous VOT challenges we showed that box trackers achieve very good performance on segmentation tasks by running a general segmentation on top of a bounding box. So you can simply run AlphaRef (or a similar box refinement module like SAM) on the top of your estimated bounding box to create the per-target segmentation mask. Running a vanilla bounding box tracker is possible, but its accuracy will be low (robustness might still be high).

• Which datasets can I use for training?

  Validation and test splits of popular tracking datasets are NOT allowed for training the model. These include: OTB, VOT, ALOV, UAV123, NUSPRO, TempleColor, AVisT, LaSOT-val, GOT10k-val, GOT10k-test, TrackingNet-val/test, TOTB. Other than above, training splits of any dataset is allowed (including LaSOT-train, TrackingNet-train, YouTubeVOS, COCO, etc.). For including the transparent objects, it is allowed to use the Trans2k dataset.

• Which performance measures are you using?

  New performance measures are developed for the VOTS challenges, here is a draft.

• When will my results be publicly available?

  The results for a registered tracker are immediately revealed to the participant via an email. But these results will not be publicly disclosed until after the VOTS2023 workshop. At that point, a public VOTS2023 challenge leaderboard will appear on the VOTS webpage.

• If I submit several time to the evaluation server, which submission will be used for the final score?

  The final submission will be used for the final score. Please make sure that the tracker description matches the code that produced the final submission.