Joint Tracking and Segmentation of Multiple Targets

Anton Milan, Laura Leal-Taixe, Konrad Schindler, Ian Reid; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 5397-5406

Tracking-by-detection has proven to be the most successful strategy to address the task of tracking multiple targets in unconstrained scenarios. Traditionally, a set of sparse detections, generated in a preprocessing step, serves as input to a high-level tracker whose goal is to correctly associate these "dots" over time. An obvious shortcoming of this approach is that most information available in image sequences is simply ignored by thresholding weak detection responses and applying non-maximum suppression. We propose a multi-target tracker that exploits low level image information and associates every (super)-pixel to a specific target or classifies it as background. As a result, we obtain an video segmentation in addition to the classical bounding-box representation in unconstrained, real-world sequences. Our method shows encouraging results on many standard benchmark sequences and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection approaches in crowded scenes with long-term partial occlusions.