Improving the efficiency in multiple object tracking by tracker switching according to occlusion states

Abstract

The objective of multiple object tracking (MOT) is to locate the positions of multiple objects in a video, maintain their identities, and obtain their individual trajectories. One of the most crucial challenges of MOT is how to handle object occlusion effectively. The existing methods try to treat different occlusion situations with the same architecture, which leads to limits on performance. More specifically some trackers can achieve fast speed (frame per second) but cannot handle occlusion effectively, while other trackers can handle occlusion properly but are expensive due to costly computational resources. The proposed method estimates the occlusion states of objects, applies different trackers according to the estimation results, and finally combines the results of different trackers. This method can reduce unnecessary computational costs, and consequently can improve the efficiency of the high accuracy trackers. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal for different scenarios.