Associate Everything Detected : Facilitating Tracking-by-Detection to the Unknown

Multi-object tracking (MOT) emerges as a pivotal and highly promising branch in the field of computer vision. Classical closed-vocabulary MOT (CV-MOT) methods aim to track objects of predefined categories. Recently, some open-vocabulary MOT (OV-MOT) methods have successfully addressed the problem of...

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Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. - 1992. - 34(2025) vom: 30., Seite 4830-4842
1. Verfasser: Fang, Zimeng (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Liang, Chao, Zhou, Xue, Zhu, Shuyuan, Li, Xi
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Multi-object tracking (MOT) emerges as a pivotal and highly promising branch in the field of computer vision. Classical closed-vocabulary MOT (CV-MOT) methods aim to track objects of predefined categories. Recently, some open-vocabulary MOT (OV-MOT) methods have successfully addressed the problem of tracking unknown categories. However, we found that the CV-MOT and OV-MOT methods each struggle to excel in the tasks of the other. In this paper, we present a unified framework, Associate Everything Detected (AED), that simultaneously tackles CV-MOT and OV-MOT by integrating with any off-the-shelf detector and supports unknown categories. Different from existing tracking-by-detection MOT methods, AED gets rid of prior knowledge (e.g., motion cues) and relies solely on highly robust feature learning to handle complex trajectories in OV-MOT tasks while keeping excellent performance in CV-MOT tasks. Specifically, we model the association task as a similarity decoding problem and propose a sim-decoder with an association-centric learning mechanism. The sim-decoder calculates similarities in three aspects: spatial, temporal, and cross-clip. Subsequently, association-centric learning leverages these threefold similarities to ensure that the extracted features are appropriate for continuous tracking and robust enough to generalize to unknown categories. Compared with existing powerful OV-MOT and CV-MOT methods, AED achieves superior performance on TAO, SportsMOT, and DanceTrack without any prior knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/balabooooo/AED
Beschreibung:Date Revised 05.08.2025
published: Print
Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE
ISSN:1941-0042
DOI:10.1109/TIP.2025.3592524