From certain to uncertain: Toward optimal solution for offline multiple object tracking

Affinity measure in object tracking outputs a similarity or distance score for given detections. As an affinity measure is typically imperfect, it generally has an uncertain region in which regarding two groups of detections as the same object or different objects based on the score can be wrong. How to reduce the uncertain region is a major challenge for most similarity-based tracking methods. Early mistakes often result in distribution drifts for tracked objects and this is another major issue for object tracking. In this paper, we propose a new offline tracking method called agglomerative hierarchical clustering with ensemble of tracking experts (AHC_ETE), to tackle the uncertain region and early mistake issues. We conduct tracking from certain to uncertain to reduce early mistakes. Meanwhile, we ensemble multiple tracking experts to reduce the uncertain region as the final uncertain region is the intersection of those of all tracking experts. Experiments on the MOT15 and MOT16 datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cyoukaikai/ahc_ete.