Robust online multi-object tracking by maximum a posteriori estimation with sequential trajectory prior

Abstract

This paper address the problem of online multi-object tracking by using the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) framework. Given the observations up to the current frame, we estimate the optimal object trajectories by solving two MAP estimation problems: object detection and trajectory-detection association. By introducing the sequential trajectory prior, i.e., the prior information from previous frames about “good” trajectories, into MAP estimation, the output of the pre-trained object detector is refined and the correctness of the association between trajectories and detections is enhanced. In addition, the sequential trajectory prior allows the two MAP stages interact with each other in a sequential manner, which facilitates online multi-object tracking. Our experiments on publicly available challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides superior performance in various complex scenes.