Multiple Object Tracking: A Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper provides the first comprehensive review of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), covering recent advances, key aspects, evaluation methods, and future research directions, to guide and inform researchers in the field.

Contribution

It offers a thorough, organized overview of MOT development, categorizes approaches, compares experimental results, and discusses future challenges and directions.

Findings

Summarizes results on popular datasets for MOT.

Identifies basic agreements and common challenges in the field.

Provides detailed analysis of different MOT approaches and their drawbacks.

Abstract

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has gained increasing attention due to its academic and commercial potential. Although different approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, it still remains challenging due to factors like abrupt appearance changes and severe object occlusions. In this work, we contribute the first comprehensive and most recent review on this problem. We inspect the recent advances in various aspects and propose some interesting directions for future research. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any extensive review on this topic in the community. We endeavor to provide a thorough review on the development of this problem in recent decades. The main contributions of this review are fourfold: 1) Key aspects in an MOT system, including formulation, categorization, key principles, evaluation of MOT are discussed; 2) Instead of enumerating individual works, we discuss existing approaches according to various aspects, in each of which methods are divided into different groups and each group is discussed in detail for the principles, advances and drawbacks; 3) We examine experiments of existing publications and summarize results on popular datasets to provide quantitative and comprehensive comparisons. By analyzing the results from different perspectives, we have verified some basic agreements in the field; and 4) We provide a discussion about issues of MOT research, as well as some interesting directions which will become potential research effort in the future.