WormTrack: Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking in Worm Crowds

Currently, multimedia systems and computer vision algorithms are increasingly playing a crucial role in biological research. However, due to the significant difference between macro and micro scenarios, it is impractical to directly transfer existing computer vision methods to the images captured by microscopes. Taking social behavior analysis of worm for example, it heavily depends on accurate and efficient Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods. Meanwhile, it faces great challenges due to the unique physical characteristics of worm, such as small size, highly uniform appearance, rapid deformation and overlapping movement. This paper studies on the challenges and existing solutions for MOT in worm crowds by building a well-designed dataset ("WormTrack") and a tracking-by-detection benchmark. We observed that the state-of-the-art MOT methods suffers from considerable performance drop on the new dataset. Therefore, we propose a customized MOT method for worm crowds by deeply understanding the physical characteristics of worms and scenes. The method is composed by an instance segmentation based detector, a multiple model fused Kalman filter based tracker and a multi-constraint based trajectory repairer. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can accurately track over 100 worms with almost identical appearance for a long period, which is exceptional compared to existing methods. We hope our work will attract further researches to explore more in this new field, and promote the crossing field researches with biology and medicine. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/Jeerrzy/wormstudio.