SOI is the Root of All Evil: Quantifying and Breaking Similar Object Interference in Single Object Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yipei, Hu, Shiyu, Jia, Shukun, Xu, Panxi, Ma, Hongfei, Ma, Yiping, Zhang, Jing, Lu, Xiaobo, Zhao, Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yipei
Hu, Shiyu
Jia, Shukun
Xu, Panxi
Ma, Hongfei
Ma, Yiping
Zhang, Jing
Lu, Xiaobo
Zhao, Xin
author_facet Wang, Yipei
Hu, Shiyu
Jia, Shukun
Xu, Panxi
Ma, Hongfei
Ma, Yiping
Zhang, Jing
Lu, Xiaobo
Zhao, Xin
contents In this paper, we present the first systematic investigation and quantification of Similar Object Interference (SOI), a long-overlooked yet critical bottleneck in Single Object Tracking (SOT). Through controlled Online Interference Masking (OIM) experiments, we quantitatively demonstrate that eliminating interference sources leads to substantial performance improvements (AUC gains up to 4.35) across all SOTA trackers, directly validating SOI as a primary constraint for robust tracking and highlighting the feasibility of external cognitive guidance. Building upon these insights, we adopt natural language as a practical form of external guidance, and construct SOIBench-the first semantic cognitive guidance benchmark specifically targeting SOI challenges. It automatically mines SOI frames through multi-tracker collective judgment and introduces a multi-level annotation protocol to generate precise semantic guidance texts. Systematic evaluation on SOIBench reveals a striking finding: existing vision-language tracking (VLT) methods fail to effectively exploit semantic cognitive guidance, achieving only marginal improvements or even performance degradation (AUC changes of -0.26 to +0.71). In contrast, we propose a novel paradigm employing large-scale vision-language models (VLM) as external cognitive engines that can be seamlessly integrated into arbitrary RGB trackers. This approach demonstrates substantial improvements under semantic cognitive guidance (AUC gains up to 0.93), representing a significant advancement over existing VLT methods. We hope SOIBench will serve as a standardized evaluation platform to advance semantic cognitive tracking research and contribute new insights to the tracking research community.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SOI is the Root of All Evil: Quantifying and Breaking Similar Object Interference in Single Object Tracking
Wang, Yipei
Hu, Shiyu
Jia, Shukun
Xu, Panxi
Ma, Hongfei
Ma, Yiping
Zhang, Jing
Lu, Xiaobo
Zhao, Xin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In this paper, we present the first systematic investigation and quantification of Similar Object Interference (SOI), a long-overlooked yet critical bottleneck in Single Object Tracking (SOT). Through controlled Online Interference Masking (OIM) experiments, we quantitatively demonstrate that eliminating interference sources leads to substantial performance improvements (AUC gains up to 4.35) across all SOTA trackers, directly validating SOI as a primary constraint for robust tracking and highlighting the feasibility of external cognitive guidance. Building upon these insights, we adopt natural language as a practical form of external guidance, and construct SOIBench-the first semantic cognitive guidance benchmark specifically targeting SOI challenges. It automatically mines SOI frames through multi-tracker collective judgment and introduces a multi-level annotation protocol to generate precise semantic guidance texts. Systematic evaluation on SOIBench reveals a striking finding: existing vision-language tracking (VLT) methods fail to effectively exploit semantic cognitive guidance, achieving only marginal improvements or even performance degradation (AUC changes of -0.26 to +0.71). In contrast, we propose a novel paradigm employing large-scale vision-language models (VLM) as external cognitive engines that can be seamlessly integrated into arbitrary RGB trackers. This approach demonstrates substantial improvements under semantic cognitive guidance (AUC gains up to 0.93), representing a significant advancement over existing VLT methods. We hope SOIBench will serve as a standardized evaluation platform to advance semantic cognitive tracking research and contribute new insights to the tracking research community.
title SOI is the Root of All Evil: Quantifying and Breaking Similar Object Interference in Single Object Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09524