Multiple object tracking via feature pyramid siamese networks

Abstract

When multiple object tracking (MOT) based on the tracking-by-detection paradigm is implemented, the similarity metric between the current detections and existing tracks plays an essential role. Most of the MOT schemes based on a deep neural network learn the similarity metric using a Siamese architecture, but the plain Siamese architecture might not be enough owing to its structural simplicity and lack of motion information. This paper aims to propose a new MOT scheme to overcome the existing problems in the conventional MOTs. Feature pyramid Siamese network (FPSN) is proposed to address the structural simplicity. The FPSN is inspired by a feature pyramid network (FPN) and it extends the Siamese network by applying FPN to the plain Siamese architecture and by developing a new multi-level discriminative feature. A spatiotemporal motion feature is added to the FPSN to overcome the lack of motion information and to enhance the performance in MOT. Thus, FPSN-MOT considers not only the appearance feature but also motion information. Finally, FPSN-MOT is applied to the public MOT challenge benchmark problems and its performance is compared to that of the other state-of-the-art MOT methods.