Multi-Object Tracking with Confidence-Based Trajectory Prediction Scheme

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) aims to associate multiple objects across consecutive video sequences and maintain continuous and stable trajectories. Currently, much attention has been paid to data association problems, where many methods filter detection boxes for object matching based on the confidence scores (CS) of the detectors without fully utilizing the detection results. Kalman filter (KF) is a traditional means for sequential frame processing, which has been widely adopted in MOT. It matches and updates a predicted trajectory with a detection box in video. However, under crowded scenes, the noise will create low-confidence detection boxes, causing identity switch (IDS) and tracking failure. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the limitations of existing trajectory prediction schemes in MOT and prove that KF can still achieve competitive results in video sequence processing if proper care is taken to handle the noise. We propose a confidence-based trajectory prediction scheme (dubbed ConfMOT) based on KF. The CS of the detection results is used to adjust the noise during updating KF and to predict the trajectories of the tracked objects in videos. While a cost matrix (CM) is constructed to measure the cost of successful matching of unreliable objects. Meanwhile, each trajectory is labeled with a unique CS, while the lost trajectories that have not been updated for a long time will be removed. Our tracker is simple yet efficient. Extensive experiments have been conducted on mainstream datasets, where our tracker has exhibited superior performance to other advanced competitors.