Assignment-Space-based Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

Multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) is important for understanding dynamic scenes in video data. Existing methods perform well on multi-object detection and segmentation for independent video frames, but tracking of objects over time remains a challenge. MOTS methods formulate tracking locally, i.e., frame-by-frame, leading to sub-optimal results. Classical global methods on tracking operate directly on object detections, which leads to a combinatorial growth in the detection space. In contrast, we formulate a global method for MOTS over the space of assignments rather than detections: First, we find all top-k assignments of objects detected and segmented between any two consecutive frames and develop a structured prediction formulation to score assignment sequences across any number of consecutive frames. We use dynamic programming to find the global optimizer of this formulation in polynomial time. Second, we connect objects which reappear after having been out of view for some time. For this we formulate an assignment problem. On the challenging KITTI-MOTS and MOTSChallenge datasets, this achieves state-of-the-art results among methods which don’t use depth data.