Improved Data Association for Multi-Pedestrian Tracking Using Image Information

Abstract: Multi-pedestrian tracking (MPT) is the task of localizing and following the trajectory of pedestrians in a sequence. Using an MPT algorithm is an important part in preventing pedestrian-vehicle collisions in Automated Driving (AD) and Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS). It has benefited greatly from the advances in computer vision and machine learning in the last decades. Using a pedestrian detector, the tracking consists of associating the detections between frames and maintaining pedestrian identities throughout the sequence. This can be a challenging task due to occlusions, missed detections and complex scenes. The number of pedestrians is unknown, and it varies with time. Finding new methods for improving MPT is an active research field and there are many approaches found in the literature. This work focuses on improving the detection-to-track association, the data association, with the help of extracted color features for each pedestrian. Utilizing the recent improvements in object detection this work shows that classical color features still is relevant in pedestrian tracking for real time applications with limited computational resources. The appearance is not only used in the data association but also integrated in a new proposed method to avoid tracking errors due to missed detections. The results show that even with simple models the color appearance can be used to improve the tracking results. Evaluation on the commonly used Multi-Object Tracking-benchmark shows an improvement in the Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy and identity switches, while keeping other measures essentially unchanged.