SpaRTA Tracking Across Occlusions via Partitioning of 3D Clouds of Points

Any 3D tracking algorithm has to deal with occlusions: multiple targets get so close to each other that the loss of their identities becomes likely; hence, potentially affecting the very quality of the data with interrupted trajectories and identity switches. Here, we present a novel tracking method that addresses the problem of occlusions within large groups of featureless objects by means of three steps: i) it represents each target as a cloud of points in 3D; ii) once a 3D cluster corresponding to an occlusion occurs, it defines a partitioning problem by introducing a cost function that uses both attractive and repulsive spatio-temporal proximity links; and iii) it minimizes the cost function through a semi-definite optimization technique specifically designed to cope with the presence of multi-minima landscapes. The algorithm is designed to work on 3D data regardless of the experimental method used: multicamera systems, lidars, radars, and RGB-D systems. By performing tests on public data-sets, we show that the new algorithm produces a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art tracking methods, both by reducing the number of identity switches and by increasing the accuracy of the estimated positions of the targets in real space.