Real-Time Multiple Object Tracking : A Study on the Importance of Speed

Sammanfattning: Multiple object tracking consists of detecting and identifying objects in video. In some applications, such as robotics and surveillance, it is desired that the tracking is performed in real-time. This poses a challenge in that it requires the algorithm to run as fast as the frame-rate of the video. Today's top performing tracking methods run at only a few frames per second, and can thus not be used in real-time. Further, when determining the speed of the tracker, it is common to not include the time it takes to detect objects. We argue that this way of measuring speed is not relevant for robotics or embedded systems, where the detecting of objects is done on the same machine as the tracking. We propose that one way of running a method in real-time is to not look at every frame, but skip frames to make the video have the same frame-rate as the tracking method. However, we believe that this will lead to decreased performance. In this project, we implement a multiple object tracker, following the tracking-by-detection paradigm, as an extension of an existing method. It works by modelling the movement of objects by solving the filtering problem, and associating detections with predicted new locations in new frames using the Hungarian algorithm. Three different similarity measures are used, which use the location and shape of the bounding boxes. Compared to other trackers on the MOTChallenge leaderboard, our method, referred to as C++SORT, is the fastest non-anonymous submission, while also achieving decent score on other metrics. By running our model on the Okutama-Action dataset, sampled at different frame-rates, we show that the performance is greatly reduced when running the model - including detecting objects - in real-time. In most metrics, the score is reduced by 50%, but in certain cases as much as 90%. We argue that this indicates that other, slower methods could not be used for tracking in real-time, but that more research is required specifically on this.