A Fast-Iterative Data Association Technique for Multiple Object Tracking

Abstract

A massive amount of video data is recorded daily for forensic post analysis and computer vision applications. The analyses of this data often require multiple object tracking (MOT). Advancements in image analysis algorithms and global optimization techniques have improved the accuracy of MOT, often at the cost of slow processing speed which limits its applications only to small video datasets. With the focus on speed, a fast-iterative data association technique (FIDA) for MOT that uses a tracking-by-detection paradigm and finds a locally optimal solution with a low computational overhead is introduced. The performance analyses conducted on a set of benchmark video datasets show that the proposed technique is significantly faster (50–600 times) than the existing state-of-the-art techniques that produce a comparable tracking accuracy.