DeconfuseTrack: Dealing with Confusion for Multi-Object Tracking

Cheng Huang, Shoudong Han, Mengyu He, Wenbo Zheng, Yuhao Wei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19290-19299

Accurate data association is crucial in reducing confusion such as ID switches and assignment errors in multi-object tracking (MOT). However existing advanced methods often overlook the diversity among trajectories and the ambiguity and conflicts present in motion and appearance cues leading to confusion among detections trajectories and associations when performing simple global data association. To address this issue we propose a simple versatile and highly interpretable data association approach called Decomposed Data Association (DDA). DDA decomposes the traditional association problem into multiple sub-problems using a series of non-learning-based modules and selectively addresses the confusion in each sub-problem by incorporating targeted exploitation of new cues. Additionally we introduce Occlusion-aware Non-Maximum Suppression (ONMS) to retain more occluded detections thereby increasing opportunities for association with trajectories and indirectly reducing the confusion caused by missed detections. Finally based on DDA and ONMS we design a powerful multi-object tracker named DeconfuseTrack specifically focused on resolving confusion in MOT. Extensive experiments conducted on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets demonstrate that our proposed DDA and ONMS significantly enhance the performance of several popular trackers. Moreover DeconfuseTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MOT17 and MOT20 test sets significantly outperforms the baseline tracker ByteTrack in metrics such as HOTA IDF1 AssA. This validates that our tracking design effectively reduces confusion caused by simple global association.