TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers

TL;DR

TrackFormer is a novel end-to-end Transformer-based approach for multi-object tracking that uses attention mechanisms to associate objects across frames without additional motion or appearance modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a new tracking-by-attention paradigm with a set prediction framework for MOT, eliminating the need for graph optimization or explicit motion modeling.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on MOT17 and MOT20 datasets.

Effectively maintains object identities over sequences.

Simplifies multi-object tracking with a unified Transformer architecture.

Abstract

The challenging task of multi-object tracking (MOT) requires simultaneous reasoning about track initialization, identity, and spatio-temporal trajectories. We formulate this task as a frame-to-frame set prediction problem and introduce TrackFormer, an end-to-end trainable MOT approach based on an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Our model achieves data association between frames via attention by evolving a set of track predictions through a video sequence. The Transformer decoder initializes new tracks from static object queries and autoregressively follows existing tracks in space and time with the conceptually new and identity preserving track queries. Both query types benefit from self- and encoder-decoder attention on global frame-level features, thereby omitting any additional graph optimization or modeling of motion and/or appearance. TrackFormer introduces a new tracking-by-attention paradigm and while simple in its design is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the task of multi-object tracking (MOT17 and MOT20) and segmentation (MOTS20). The code is available at https://github.com/timmeinhardt/trackformer .