Focus On Details: Online Multi-object Tracking with Diverse Fine-grained Representation

Discriminative representation is essential to keep a unique identifier for each target in Multiple object tracking (MOT). Some recent MOT methods extract features of the bounding box region or the center point as identity embeddings. However, when targets are occluded, these coarse-grained global representations become unreliable. To this end, we propose exploring diverse fine-grained representation, which describes appearance comprehensively from global and local perspectives. This fine-grained representation requires high feature resolution and precise semantic information. To effectively alleviate the semantic misalignment caused by indiscriminate contextual information aggregation, Flow Alignment FPN (FAFPN) is proposed for multi-scale feature alignment aggregation. It generates semantic flow among feature maps from different resolutions to transform their pixel positions. Furthermore, we present a Multi-head Part Mask Generator (MPMG) to extract fine-grained representation based on the aligned feature maps. Multiple parallel branches of MPMG allow it to focus on different parts of targets to generate local masks without label supervision. The diverse details in target masks facilitate fine-grained representation. Eventually, benefiting from a Shuffle-Group Sampling (SGS) training strategy with positive and negative samples balanced, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MOT17 and MOT20 test sets. Even on DanceTrack, where the appearance of targets is extremely similar, our method significantly outperforms Byte-Track by 5.0% on HOTA and 5.6% on IDF1. Extensive experiments have proved that diverse fine-grained representation makes Re-ID great again in MOT.

Automated summary

Discriminative representation is crucial for maintaining unique identifiers for each target in multiple object tracking. Some recent methods have extracted features from the bounding box region or center point as identity embeddings, but these global representations become unreliable when targets are occluded. This study proposes exploring diverse fine-grained representation that comprehensively describes appearance from global and local perspectives.