DBSCAN-Based Tracklet Association Annealer for Advanced Multi-Object Tracking

Recently, as the demand for technological advancement in the field of autonomous driving and smart video surveillance is gradually increasing, considerable progress in multi-object tracking using deep neural networks has been achieved, and its application field is also expanding. However, various problems have not been fully addressed owing to the inherent limitations in video cameras, such as the tracking of objects in an occluded environment. Therefore, in this study, we propose a density-based object tracking technique redesigned based on DBSCAN, which has high robustness against noise and is excellent for nonlinear clustering. Moreover, it improves the noise vulnerability inherent to multi-object tracking, reduces the difficulty of trajectory separation, and facilitates real-time processing through simple structural expansion. Through performance test evaluation, it was confirmed that by using the proposed technique, several performance indices were improved compared to the existing tracking technique. In particular, when added as a post processor to the existing tracker, the tracking performance owing to noise suppression was considerably improved by more than 10%. Thus, the proposed method can be applied in industrial environments, such as real pedestrian analysis and surveillance security systems.