Continuous Energy Minimization for Multi-Target Tracking

Many recent advances in multiple target tracking aim at finding a (nearly) optimal set of trajectories within a temporal window. To handle the large space of possible trajectory hypotheses, it is typically reduced to a finite set by some form of data-driven or regular discretization. In this work we propose an alternative formulation of multi-target tracking as minimization of a continuous energy. Contrary to recent approaches, we focus on designing an energy that corresponds to a more complete representation of the problem, rather than one that is amenable to global optimization. Besides the image evidence, the energy function takes into account physical constraints, such as target dynamics, mutual exclusion, and track persistence. In addition, partial image evidence is handled with explicit occlusion reasoning, and different targets are disambiguated with an appearance model. To nevertheless find strong local minima of the proposed non-convex energy we construct a suitable optimization scheme that alternates between continuous conjugate gradient descent and discrete trans-dimensional jump moves. These moves, which are executed such that they always reduce the energy, allow the search to escape weak minima and explore a much larger portion of the search space of varying dimensionality. We demonstrate the validity of our approach with an extensive quantitative evaluation on several public datasets.

Continuous Energy Minimization for Multi-Target Tracking

A. Milan, S. Roth and K. Schindler
PAMI 36(1), 2014
bibtex | video

@article{Milan:2014:CEM,
	author = {Milan, A. and Roth, S. and Schindler, K.},	
	title = {Continuous Energy Minimization for Multitarget Tracking},
	volume = {36},
	issn = {0162-8828},
	doi = {10.1109/TPAMI.2013.103},
	number = {1},
	journal = {IEEE TPAMI},
	year = {2014},
	pages = {58--72}
}
			

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An Analytical Formulation of Global Occlusion Reasoning for Multi-Target Tracking

A. Andriyenko, S. Roth and K. Schindler
ICCV Workshop on Visual Surveillance
bibtex | poster | video

@inproceedings{Andriyenko:2011:AFG,
	Author = {Anton Milan and Stefan Roth and Konrad Schindler},
	Booktitle = {Proc. of the 11th International IEEE Workshop on Visual Surveillance},
	Title = {An Analytical Formulation of Global Occlusion Reasoning for Multi-Target Tracking},
	Year = {2011}
}
			

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Multi-target Tracking by Continuous Energy Minimization

A. Andriyenko and K. Schindler
CVPR 2011
bibtex | poster | video

@inproceedings{Andriyenko:2011:MTT,
	Author = {Anton Andriyenko and Konrad Schindler},
	Booktitle = {CVPR},
	Title = {Multi-target Tracking by Continuous Energy Minimization},
	Year = {2011}
}