Hard to Track Objects with Irregular Motions and Similar Appearances? Make It Easier by Buffering the Matching Space

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Cascaded Buffered IoU (C-BIoU) tracker, which improves multi-object tracking for irregular motions and similar appearances by expanding the matching space with buffers and cascaded matching, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel C-BIoU tracker that enhances object matching in challenging scenarios by buffering and cascaded matching, addressing limitations of appearance and motion features.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on MOT datasets with irregular motions.

Secures 2nd place in CVPR'22 SoccerNet MOT and ECCV'22 MOTComplex challenges.

Effectively handles objects with similar appearances and irregular movements.

Abstract

We propose a Cascaded Buffered IoU (C-BIoU) tracker to track multiple objects that have irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. When appearance features are unreliable and geometric features are confused by irregular motions, applying conventional Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods may generate unsatisfactory results. To address this issue, our C-BIoU tracker adds buffers to expand the matching space of detections and tracks, which mitigates the effect of irregular motions in two aspects: one is to directly match identical but non-overlapping detections and tracks in adjacent frames, and the other is to compensate for the motion estimation bias in the matching space. In addition, to reduce the risk of overexpansion of the matching space, cascaded matching is employed: first matching alive tracks and detections with a small buffer, and then matching unmatched tracks and detections with a large buffer. Despite its simplicity, our C-BIoU tracker works surprisingly well and achieves state-of-the-art results on MOT datasets that focus on irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. Moreover, the C-BIoU tracker is the dominant component for our 2-nd place solution in the CVPR'22 SoccerNet MOT and ECCV'22 MOTComplex DanceTrack challenges. Finally, we analyze the limitation of our C-BIoU tracker in ablation studies and discuss its application scope.