A thermal Object Tracking benchmark

Short-term single-object (STSO) tracking in thermal images is a challenging problem relevant in a growing number of applications. In order to evaluate STSO tracking algorithms on visual imagery, there are de facto standard benchmarks. However, we argue that tracking in thermal imagery is different than in visual imagery, and that a separate benchmark is needed. The available thermal infrared datasets are few and the existing ones are not challenging for modern tracking algorithms. Therefore, we hereby propose a thermal infrared benchmark according to the Visual Visual Object Tracking (VOT) protocol for evaluation of STSO tracking methods. The benchmark includes the new LTIR dataset containing 20 thermal image sequences which have been collected from multiple sources and annotated in the format used in the VOT Challenge. In addition, we show that the ranking of different tracking principles differ between the visual and thermal benchmarks, confirming the need for the new benchmark.