Multi-object tracking has been recently approached with the min-cost network flow optimization techniques. Such methods simultaneously resolve multiple object tracks in a video and enable modeling of dependencies among tracks. Min-cost network flow methods also fit well within the "tracking-by-detection" paradigm where object trajectories are obtained by connecting per-frame outputs of an object detector. Object detectors, however, often fail due to occlusions and clutter in the video. To cope with such situations, we propose to add pairwise costs to the min-cost network flow framework. While integer solutions to such a problem become NP-hard, we design a convex relaxation solution with an efficient rounding heuristic which empirically gives certificates of small suboptimality. We evaluate two particular types of pairwise costs and demonstrate improvements over recent tracking methods in real-world video sequences.
This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous tracking of multiple targets in a video. We first apply object detectors to every video frame. Pairs of detection responses from every two consecutive frames are then used to build a graph of tracklets. The graph helps transitively link the best matching tracklets that do not violate hard and soft contextual constraints between the resulting tracks. We prove that this data association problem can be formulated as finding the maximum-weight independent set (MWIS) of the graph. We present a new, polynomial-time MWIS algorithm, and prove that it converges to an optimum. Similarity and contextual constraints between object detections, used for data association, are learned online from object appearance and motion properties. Long-term occlusions are addressed by iteratively repeating MWIS to hierarchically merge smaller tracks into longer ones. Our results demonstrate advantages of simultaneously accounting for soft and hard contextual constraints in multitarget tracking. We outperform the state of the art on the benchmark datasets. When tracking multiple targets in crowded scenarios, modeling mutual exclusion between distinct targets becomes important at two levels: (1) in data association, each target observation should support at most one trajectory and each trajectory should be assigned at most one observation per frame, (2) in trajectory estimation, two trajectories should remain spatially separated at all times to avoid collisions. Yet, existing trackers often sidestep these important constraints. We address this using a mixed discrete-continuous conditional random field (CRF) that explicitly models both types of constraints: Exclusion between conflicting observations with super modular pairwise terms, and exclusion between trajectories by generalizing global label costs to suppress the co-occurrence of incompatible labels (trajectories). We develop an expansion move-based MAP estimation scheme that handles both non-sub modular constraints and pairwise global label costs. Furthermore, we perform a statistical analysis of ground-truth trajectories to derive appropriate CRF potentials for modeling data fidelity, target dynamics, and inter-target occlusion. Many recent advances in multiple target tracking aim at finding a (nearly) optimal set of trajectories within a temporal window. To handle the large space of possible trajectory hypotheses, it is typically reduced to a finite set by some form of data-driven or regular discretization. In this work, we propose an alternative formulation of multitarget tracking as minimization of a continuous energy. Contrary to recent approaches, we focus on designing an energy that corresponds to a more complete representation of the problem, rather than one that is amenable to global optimization. Besides the image evidence, the energy function takes into account physical constraints, such as target dynamics, mutual exclusion, and track persistence. In addition, partial image evidence is handled with explicit occlusion reasoning, and different targets are disambiguated with an appearance model. To nevertheless find strong local minima of the proposed nonconvex energy, we construct a suitable optimization scheme that alternates between continuous conjugate gradient descent and discrete transdimensional jump moves. These moves, which are executed such that they always reduce the energy, allow the search to escape weak minima and explore a much larger portion of the search space of varying dimensionality. We demonstrate the validity of our approach with an extensive quantitative evaluation on several public data sets.