Focus and track: pixel-wise spatio-temporal hurricane tracking (Research Track)
Sookyung Kim (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory); Sunghyun Park (Korea University); Sunghyo Chung (Korea University); Yunsung Lee (Korea University); Hyojin Kim (LLNL); Joonseok Lee (Google Research); Jaegul Choo (Korea University); Mr Prabhat (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Abstract
We tackle extreme climate event tracking problem. It has unique challenges to other visual object tracking problems, including wider range of spatio-temporal dynamics, blur boundary of the target, and shortage of labeled dataset. In this paper, we propose a simple but robust end-to-end model based on multi-layered ConvLSTM, suitable for the climate event tracking problem. It first learns to imprint location and appearance of the target at the first frame with one-shot auto-encoding fashion, and then, the learned feature is consumed by the tracking module to track the target in subsequent time frames. To tackle the data shortage problem, we propose data augmentation based on Social GAN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework significantly improves tracking performance on hurricane tracking task over several state-of-the-art methods.