StableTrack: Stabilizing Multi-Object Tracking on Low-Frequency Detections

TL;DR

StableTrack is a new multi-object tracking method that enhances tracking stability under low detection frequency by introducing a two-stage matching strategy, a novel distance metric, and integrating visual tracking with Kalman filtering.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-stage matching strategy, a Bbox-Based Distance metric, and integrates visual tracking into Kalman Filter to improve low-frequency detection tracking.

Findings

11.6% HOTA improvement at 1 Hz on MOT17-val

Outperforms state-of-the-art in low-frequency detection scenarios

Maintains competitive performance on standard benchmarks

Abstract

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, where it is important to correctly detect objects and associate these detections across frames. Current approaches mainly focus on tracking objects in each frame of a video stream, making it almost impossible to run the model under conditions of limited computing resources. To address this issue, we propose StableTrack, a novel approach that stabilizes the quality of tracking on low-frequency detections. Our method introduces a new two-stage matching strategy to improve the cross-frame association between low-frequency detections. We propose a novel Bbox-Based Distance instead of the conventional Mahalanobis distance, which allows us to effectively match objects using the Re-ID model. Furthermore, we integrate visual tracking into the Kalman Filter and the overall tracking pipeline. Our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers in the case of low-frequency detections, achieving $\textit{11.6%}$ HOTA improvement at $\textit{1}$ Hz on MOT17-val, while keeping up with the best approaches on the standard MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack benchmarks with full-frequency detections.