PFT: A protocol for evaluating video trackers

The growing interest in developing video tracking algorithms has not been accompanied by the development of commonly used evaluation criteria to assess and to compare their performance. Researchers often present trackers' results on different datasets and evaluate them with different performance measures thus hindering both formative and summative quality assessment. In this paper, we present a protocol to evaluate the performance of tracking algorithms that tests video trackers using a set of trials and a pre-defined set of sequences and that enables objective and reproducible performance evaluation of trackers using ground truth information. Each trial highlights strengths and weaknesses of a tracker on simulated test scenarios on real sequences that represent real-world scenarios. Moreover a new evaluation measure is introduced that allows us to summarize the performance of a tracker based on the lost-track-ratio curve. The validation and the effectiveness of the proposed protocol is demonstrated experimentally on three trackers and its implementation is made available online to the research community.