Umeå University's logo

The Visual Object Tracking Segmentation VOTS2024 challenge is the twelfth annual tracker benchmarking activity of the VOT initiative. This challenge consolidates the new tracking setup proposed in VOTS2023, which merges short-term and long-term as well as single-target and multiple-target tracking with segmentation masks as the only target location specification. Two sub-challenges are considered. The VOTS2024 standard challenge, focusing on classical objects and the VOTSt2024, which considers objects undergoing a topological transformation. Both challenges use the same performance evaluation methodology. Results of 28 submissions are presented and analyzed. A leaderboard, with participating trackers details, the source code, the datasets, and the evaluation kit are publicly available on the website (https://www.votchallenge.net/vots2024/).

Accurate forecasting and analysis of emerging pandemics play a crucial role in effective public health management and decision-making. Traditional approaches primarily rely on epidemiological data, overlooking other valuable sources of information that could act as sensors or indicators of pandemic patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, MGLEP, that integrates temporal graph neural networks and multi-modal data for learning and forecasting. We incorporate big data sources, including social media content, by utilizing specific pre-trained language models and discovering the underlying graph structure among users. This integration provides rich indicators of pandemic dynamics through learning with temporal graph neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in pandemic forecasting and analysis, outperforming baseline methods across different areas, pandemic situations, and prediction horizons. The fusion of temporal graph learning and multi-modal data enables a comprehensive understanding of the pandemic landscape with less time lag, cheap cost, and more potential information indicators.

The Visual Object Tracking Segmentation VOTS2023 challenge is the eleventh annual tracker benchmarking activity of the VOT initiative. This challenge is the first to merge short-term and long-term as well as single-target and multiple-target tracking with segmentation masks as the only target location specification. A new dataset was created; the ground truth has been withheld to prevent overfitting. New performance measures and evaluation protocols have been created along with a new toolkit and an evaluation server. Results of the presented 47 trackers indicate that modern tracking frameworks are well-suited to deal with convergence of short-term and long-term tracking and that multiple and single target tracking can be considered a single problem. A leaderboard, with participating trackers details, the source code, the datasets, and the evaluation kit are publicly available at the challenge website1