Online Multi-Object Tracking with delta-GLMB Filter based on Occlusion and Identity Switch Handling

In this paper, we propose an online multi-object tracking (MOT) method in a delta Generalized Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (delta-GLMB) filter framework to address occlusion and miss-detection issues, reduce false alarms, and recover identity switch (ID switch). To handle occlusion and miss-detection issues, we propose a measurement-to-disappeared track association method based on one-step delta-GLMB filter, so it is possible to manage these difficulties by jointly processing occluded or miss-detected objects. This part of proposed method is based on a proposed similarity metric which is responsible for defining the weight of hypothesized reappeared tracks. We also extend the delta-GLMB filter to efficiently recover switched IDs using the cardinality density, size and color features of the hypothesized tracks. We also propose a novel birth model to achieve more effective clutter removal performance. In both occlusion/miss-detection handler and newly-birthed object detector sections of the proposed method, unassigned measurements play a significant role, since they are used as the candidates for reappeared or birth objects. In addition, we perform an ablation study which confirms the effectiveness of our contributions in comparison with the baseline method. We evaluate the proposed method on well-known and publicly available MOT15 and MOT17 test datasets which are focused on pedestrian tracking. Experimental results show that the proposed tracker performs better or at least at the same level of the state-of-the-art online and offline MOT methods. It effectively handles the occlusion and ID switch issues and reduces false alarms as well.