Online multiple object tracking via flow and convolutional features

We propose an online multiple object tracking algorithm that exploits optical flow and convolutional features to handle noisy detections as well as frequent occlusion. To achieve robust tracking, we develop a data association method that deals with tracking scenarios of increasing difficulty. For easy scenarios, we use motion affinity to associate detections with objects. For ambiguous situations, we propose to use an appearance model based on convolutional features and correlation filters to complement template matching methods. For difficult cases where objects are under heavy occlusion, we carry out occlusion analysis, which exploits the relationship between targets and occluders to predict potential object locations. To deal with noisy detections, false positives are detected and removed on both raw detection and tracklet levels, while missing and inaccurate detections are recovered or corrected via short-term tracking. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed online algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.