Deep Efficient Data Association for Multi-Object Tracking: Augmented with SSIM-Based Ambiguity Elimination

Recently, to address the multiple object tracking (MOT) problem, we harnessed the power of deep learning-based methods. The tracking-by-detection approach to multiple object tracking (MOT) involves two primary steps: object detection and data association. In the first step, objects of interest are detected in each frame of a video. The second step establishes the correspondence between these detected objects across different frames to track their trajectories. This paper proposes an efficient and unified data association method that utilizes a deep feature association network (deepFAN) to learn the associations. Additionally, the Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) is employed to address uncertainties in the data association, complementing the deep feature association network. These combined association computations effectively link the current detections with the previous tracks, enhancing the overall tracking performance. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed MOT framework, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the popular MOT datasets, such as the MOT challenge and UA-DETRAC. The results showed that our technique performed substantially better than the current state-of-the-art methods in terms of standard MOT metrics.