Pedestrian tracking is a challenging task in the area of visual object tracking research and it is a vital component of various vision-based applications such as surveillance systems, human-following robots, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we proposed a single pedestrian tracking (SPT) framework for identifying each instance of a person across all video frames through a tracking-by-detection paradigm that combines deep learning and metric learning-based approaches. The SPT framework comprises three main modules: detection, re-identification, and tracking. Our contribution is a significant improvement in the results by designing two compact metric learning-based models using Siamese architecture in the pedestrian re-identification module and combining one of the most robust re-identification models for data associated with the pedestrian detector in the tracking module. We carried out several analyses to evaluate the performance of our SPT framework for single pedestrian tracking in the videos. The results of the re-identification module validate that our two proposed re-identification models surpass existing state-of-the-art models with increased accuracies of 79.2% and 83.9% on the large dataset and 92% and 96% on the small dataset. Moreover, the proposed SPT tracker, along with six state-of-the-art (SOTA) tracking models, has been tested on various indoor and outdoor video sequences. A qualitative analysis considering six major environmental factors verifies the effectiveness of our SPT tracker under illumination changes, appearance variations due to pose changes, changes in target position, and partial occlusions. In addition, quantitative analysis based on experimental results also demonstrates that our proposed SPT tracker outperforms the GOTURN, CSRT, KCF, and SiamFC trackers with a success rate of 79.7% while beating the DiamSiamRPN, SiamFC, CSRT, GOTURN, and SiamMask trackers with an average of 18 tracking frames per second.
Keywords: Siamese network; YOLO; convolutional neural network; deep learning; metric learning; person re-identification; single object tracking.