Recently, there has been tremendous progress in developing each individual module of the standard perception-planning robot autonomy pipeline, including detection, tracking, prediction of other agents' trajectories, and ego-agent trajectory planning. Nevertheless, there has been less attention given to the principled integration of these components, particularly in terms of the characterization and mitigation of cascading errors. This paper addresses the problem of cascading errors by focusing on the coupling between the tracking and prediction modules. First, by using state-of-the-art tracking and prediction tools, we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of how severely errors stemming from tracking can impact prediction performance. On the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, we find that predictions consuming tracked trajectories as inputs (the typical case in practice) can experience a significant (even order of magnitude) drop in performance in comparison to the idealized setting where ground truth past trajectories are used as inputs. To address this issue, we propose a multi-hypothesis tracking and prediction framework. Rather than relying on a single set of tracking results for prediction, our framework simultaneously reasons about multiple sets of tracking results, thereby increasing the likelihood of including accurate tracking results as inputs to prediction. We show that this framework improves overall prediction performance over the standard single-hypothesis tracking-prediction pipeline by up to 34.2% on the nuScenes dataset, with even more significant improvements (up to ~70%) when restricting the evaluation to challenging scenarios involving identity switches and fragments -- all with an acceptable computation overhead.
Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology（新加坡-麻省理工学院研究与技术联盟）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Target detection and tracking provides crucial information for motion planning and decision making in autonomous driving. This paper proposes an online multi-object tracking (MOT) framework with tracking-by-detection for maneuvering vehicles under motion uncertainty in dynamic road context. We employ a point cloud based vehicle detector to provide real-time 3D bounding boxes of detected vehicles and conduct the online bipartite optimization of the maneuver-orientated data association between the detections and the targets. Kalman Filter (KF) is adopted as the backbone for multi-object tracking…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
In this study, a multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) algorithm for multi-target multi-camera tracking (MCT) with disjoint views is proposed. Our method forms track-hypothesis trees, and each branch of them represents a multi-camera track of a target that may move within a camera as well as move across cameras. Furthermore, multi-target tracking within a camera is performed simultaneously with the tree formation by manipulating a status of each track hypothesis. Each status represents three different stages of a multi-camera track: tracking, searching, and end-of-track. The tracking status means…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）
Current methods in multiple object tracking (MOT) rely on independent object trajectories undergoing predictable motion to effectively track large numbers of objects. Adversarial conditions such as volatile object motion and imperfect detections create a challenging tracking landscape in which established methods may yield inadequate results. Multiple hypothesis hypergraph tracking (MHHT) is developed to perform MOT among interdependent objects amid noisy detections. The method extends traditional multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) via hypergraphs to model correlated object motion, allowing fo…
Despite rapid progress in scene segmentation in recent years, 3D segmentation methods are still limited when there is severe occlusion. The key challenge is estimating the segment boundaries of (partially) occluded objects, which are inherently ambiguous when considering only a single frame. In this work, we propose Multihypothesis Segmentation Tracking (MST), a novel method for volumetric segmentation in changing scenes, which allows scene ambiguity to be tracked and our estimates to be adjusted over time as we interact with the scene. Two main innovations allow us to tackle this difficult pr…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet, University Hospital of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学医院）；Erasmus MC Rotterdam（鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心）
Knowledge of airway tree morphology has important clinical applications in diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We present an automatic tree extraction method based on multiple hypothesis tracking and template matching for this purpose and evaluate its performance on chest CT images. The method is adapted from a semi-automatic method devised for vessel segmentation. Idealized tubular templates are constructed that match airway probability obtained from a trained classifier and ranked based on their relative significance. Several such regularly spaced templates form the local hyp…
University of Latvia（拉脱维亚大学）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf（亥姆霍兹德累斯顿罗森多夫研究中心）
An efficient and versatile implementation of offline multiple hypothesis tracking with Algorithm X for optimal association search was developed using Python. The code is intended for scientific applications that do not require online processing. Directed graph framework is used and multiple scans with progressively increasing time window width are used for edge construction for maximum likelihood trajectories. The current version of the code was developed for applications in multiphase hydrodynamics, e.g. bubble and particle tracking, and is capable of resolving object motion, merges and split…
GPU-GLMB: Assessing the Scalability of GPU-Accelerated Multi-Hypothesis Tracking
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst（信息与计算机科学学院，马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军作战能力发展指挥部，陆军研究实验室）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Aiming to address the fast multi-object tracking for dense small object in the cluster background, we review track orientated multi-hypothesis tracking(TOMHT) with consideration of batch optimization. Employing autocorrelation based motion score test and staged hypotheses merging approach, we build our homologous hypothesis generation and management method. A new one-to-many constraint is proposed and applied to tackle the track exclusions during complex occlusions. Besides, to achieve better results, we develop a multi-appearance segmentation for detection, which exploits tree-like topologica…
Université catholique de Louvain（鲁汶天主教大学）；Keemotion（基莫申公司）
This paper assumes prior detections of multiple targets at each time instant, and uses a graph-based approach to connect those detections across time, based on their position and appearance estimates. In contrast to most earlier works in the field, our framework has been designed to exploit the appearance features, even when they are only sporadically available, or affected by a non-stationary noise, along the sequence of detections. This is done by implementing an iterative hypothesis testing strategy to progressively aggregate the detections into short trajectories, named tracklets. Specific…
We consider multitarget detection and tracking problem for a class of multipath detection system where one target may generate multiple measurements via multiple propagation paths, and the association relationship among targets, measurements and propagation paths is unknown. In order to effectively utilize multipath measurements from one target to improve detection and tracking performance, a tracker has to handle high-dimensional estimation of latent variables including target active/dormant meta-state, target kinematic state, and multipath data association. Based on variational Bayesian infe…
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and trajectory forecasting are two critical components in modern 3D perception systems. We hypothesize that it is beneficial to unify both tasks under one framework to learn a shared feature representation of agent interaction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we propose a unified solution for 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting which also incorporates two additional novel computational units. First, we employ a feature interaction technique by introducing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture the way in which multiple agents interact with one another. The GNN is abl…
AWS AI Labs（AWS人工智能实验室）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
We propose an online tracking algorithm that performs the object detection and data association under a common framework, capable of linking objects after a long time span. This is realized by preserving a large spatio-temporal memory to store the identity embeddings of the tracked objects, and by adaptively referencing and aggregating useful information from the memory as needed. Our model, called MeMOT, consists of three main modules that are all Transformer-based: 1) Hypothesis Generation that produce object proposals in the current video frame; 2) Memory Encoding that extracts the core inf…
Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
We propose a novel online multi-target visual tracker based on the recently developed Hypothesized and Independent Stochastic Population (HISP) filter. The HISP filter combines advantages of traditional tracking approaches like MHT and point-process-based approaches like PHD filter, and it has linear complexity while maintaining track identities. We apply this filter for tracking multiple targets in video sequences acquired under varying environmental conditions and targets density using a tracking-by-detection approach. We also adopt deep CNN appearance representation by training a verificati…
Object triangulation, 3-D object tracking, feature correspondence, and camera calibration are key problems for estimation from camera networks. This paper addresses these problems within a unified Bayesian framework for joint multi-object tracking and sensor registration. Given that using standard filtering approaches for state estimation from cameras is problematic, an alternative parametrisation is exploited, called disparity space. The disparity space-based approach for triangulation and object tracking is shown to be more effective than non-linear versions of the Kalman filter and particle…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）；Wormpex AI Research（华如科技人工智能研究院）；University of Illinois at Chicago（芝加哥大学伊利诺伊分校）
Bitdefender（比特梵德）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所）
We propose an object tracking method, SFTrack++, that smoothly learns to preserve the tracked object consistency over space and time dimensions by taking a spectral clustering approach over the graph of pixels from the video, using a fast 3D filtering formulation for finding the principal eigenvector of this graph's adjacency matrix. To better capture complex aspects of the tracked object, we enrich our formulation to multi-channel inputs, which permit different points of view for the same input. The channel inputs are in our experiments, the output of multiple tracking methods. After combinin…
INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes（法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔-罗纳-阿尔卑斯研究中心）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Object tracking is an ubiquitous problem that appears in many applications such as remote sensing, audio processing, computer vision, human-machine interfaces, human-robot interaction, etc. Although thoroughly investigated in computer vision, tracking a time-varying number of persons remains a challenging open problem. In this paper, we propose an on-line variational Bayesian model for multi-person tracking from cluttered visual observations provided by person detectors. The contributions of this paper are the followings. First, we propose a variational Bayesian framework for tracking an unkno…
Cortexica Vision Systems Ltd.（科蒂西卡视觉系统有限公司）；Mesirow Financial（梅斯罗金融公司）；AnyVision（安尼维逊）
Defining a multi-target motion model, which is an important step of tracking algorithms, can be very challenging. Using fixed models (as in several generative Bayesian algorithms, such as Kalman filters) can fail to accurately predict sophisticated target motions. On the other hand, sequential learning of the motion model (for example, using recurrent neural networks) can be computationally complex and difficult due to the variable unknown number of targets. In this paper, we propose a multi-target filtering and tracking algorithm which learns the motion model, simultaneously for all targets, …
De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
We propose a novel online multi-object visual tracker using a Gaussian mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) filter and deep appearance learning. The GM-PHD filter has a linear complexity with the number of objects and observations while estimating the states and cardinality of time-varying number of objects, however, it is susceptible to miss-detections and does not include the identity of objects. We use visual-spatio-temporal information obtained from object bounding boxes and deeply learned appearance representations to perform estimates-to-tracks data association for target labe…
Research Institute of Intelligent Control and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学智能控制与系统研究所）；Brunel University London（伦敦布鲁内尔大学）；Ningbo Institute of Intelligent Equipment Technology Company, Ltd（宁波智能装备技术有限公司）
Online multi-object tracking (MOT) is an active research topic in the domain of computer vision. Although many previously proposed algorithms have exhibited decent results, the issue of tracklet inactivation has not been sufficiently studied. Simple strategies such as using a fixed threshold on classification scores are adopted, yielding undesirable tracking mistakes and limiting the overall performance. In this paper, a conditional random field (CRF) based framework is put forward to tackle the tracklet inactivation issue in online MOT problems. A discrete CRF which exploits the intra-frame r…
Tracking a target of interest in both sparse and crowded environments is a challenging problem, not yet successfully addressed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new long-term visual tracking algorithm, learning discriminative correlation filters and using an online classifier, to track a target of interest in both sparse and crowded video sequences. First, we learn a translation correlation filter using a multi-layer hybrid of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and traditional hand-crafted features. We combine advantages of both the lower convolutional layer which retains more sp…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）；LG Electronics（LG电子）；University of Regina（里贾纳大学）
In this paper, we propose an efficient online multi-object tracking framework based on the GMPHD filter and occlusion group management scheme where the GMPHD filter utilizes hierarchical data association to reduce the false negatives caused by miss detection. The hierarchical data association consists of two steps: detection-to-track and track-to-track associations, which can recover the lost tracks and their switched IDs. In addition, the proposed framework is equipped with an object grouping management scheme which handles occlusion problems with two main parts. The first part is "track merg…
Gwangju Institute of Technology（光州科学技术院）；Hyundai Motor Company（现代汽车公司）；SI Analytics Co., Ltd.（SI Analytics有限公司）；Korea University（高丽大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院）
In this paper, we propose a highly practical fully online multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) method that uses instance segmentation results as an input. The proposed method is based on the Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GMPHD) filter, a hierarchical data association (HDA), and a mask-based affinity fusion (MAF) model to achieve high-performance online tracking. The HDA consists of two associations: segment-to-track and track-to-track associations. One affinity, for position and motion, is computed by using the GMPHD filter, and the other affinity, for appearance is…
