Interacting Tracklets for Multi-object Tracking

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2018 Sep;27(9):4585-4597. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2018.2843129. Epub 2018 Jun 1.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to exploit the interactions between non-associable tracklets to facilitate multi-object tracking. We introduce two types of tracklet interactions, close interaction and distant interaction. The close interaction imposes physical constraints between two temporally overlapping tracklets and more importantly, allows us to learn local classifiers to distinguish targets that are close to each other in the spatiotemporal domain. The distant interaction, on the other hand, accounts for the higher-order motion and appearance consistency between two temporally isolated tracklets. Our approach is modeled as a binary labeling problem and solved using the efficient Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (QPBO). It yields promising tracking performance on the challenging PETS09 and MOT16 dataset. Our code will be made publicly available upon the acceptance of the manuscript.