Abstract
Significant effort has been devoted within the visual tracking community to rapid learning of object properties on the fly. However, state-of-the-art approaches still often fail in cases such as rapid out-of-plane rotation, when the appearance changes suddenly. One of the major contributions of this work is a radical rethinking of the traditional wisdom of modelling 3D motion as appearance change during tracking. Instead, 3D motion is modelled as 3D motion. This intuitive but previously unexplored approach provides new possibilities in visual tracking research. Firstly, 3D tracking is more general, as large out-of-plane motion is often fatal for 2D trackers, but helps 3D trackers to build better models. Secondly, the tracker’s internal model of the object can be used in many different applications and it could even become the main motivation, with tracking supporting reconstruction rather than vice versa. This effectively bridges the gap between visual tracking and Structure from Motion. A new benchmark dataset of sequences with extreme out-ofplane rotation is presented and an online leader-board offered to stimulate new research in the relatively underdeveloped area of 3D tracking. The proposed method, provided as a baseline, is capable of successfully tracking these sequences, all of which pose a considerable challenge to 2D trackers (error reduced by 46 %).