A General Recurrent Tracking Framework Without Real Data

Shuai Wang, Hao Sheng, Yang Zhang, Yubin Wu, Zhang Xiong; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 13219-13228

Recent progress in multi-object tracking (MOT) has shown great significance of a robust scoring mechanism for potential tracks. However, the lack of available data in MOT makes it difficult to learn a general scoring mechanism. Multiple cues including appearance, motion and etc., are limitedly utilized in current manual scoring functions. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Nodes Tracking (MNT) framework that adapts to most trackers. Based on this framework, a Recurrent Tracking Unit (RTU) is designed to score potential tracks through long-term information. In addition, we present a method of generating simulated tracking data without real data to overcome the defect of limited available data in MOT. The experiments demonstrate that our simulated tracking data is effective for training RTU and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both MOT17 and MOT16 benchmarks. Meanwhile, RTU can be flexibly plugged into classic trackers such as DeepSORT and MHT, and makes remarkable improvements as well.