BPMTrack: Multi-Object Tracking With Detection Box Application Pattern Mining

The key to multi-object tracking is its stability and the retention of identity information. A common problem with most detection-based approaches is trusting and using all the detector outputs for the association. However, some settings of detectors can affect stable long-range tracking. Based on the principle of reducing the association noise in the detection processing step, we propose a new framework, the Box application Pattern Mining Tracker (BPMTrack), to address this issue. Specifically, we worked on three main aspects: output threshold, association strategy, and motion model. Due to the problem of inconsistency between classification scores and localization accuracy, we propose the Box Quality Estimation Network (BQENet) to predict the localization quality scores of all detections in the current frame, reserving high-quality boxes for the tracker. In addition, based on observations of intensive scenarios, we propose a simple and effective data association method, the Non-Maximum Suppression Integration (NMSI) matching strategy. It recovers the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) detection, inputs them into BQENet, and then performs hierarchical matching with reasonable control of box priority to alleviate the problem of absent objects caused by occlusion. Finally, we propose an improved Measurement Correct and Noise Scale (MCNS) Kalman algorithm to improve the prediction accuracy of object positions and, thus, the association quality. We performed an extensive ablation evaluation of the proposed framework to prove its effectiveness. Moreover, the three tracking benchmarks show our method’s accuracy and long-distance performance.