More Than Meets the Eye: Enhancing Multi-Object Tracking Even with Prolonged Occlusions

Abstract

This paper introduces MOTE (MOre Than meets the Eye), a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithm designed to address the challenges of tracking occluded objects. By integrating deformable detection transformers with a custom disocclusion matrix, MOTE significantly enhances the ability to track objects even when they are temporarily hidden from view. The algorithm leverages optical flow to generate features that are processed through a softmax splatting layer, which aids in the creation of a disocclusion matrix. This matrix plays a crucial role in maintaining track consistency by estimating the motion of occluded objects. MOTE's architecture includes modifications to the enhanced track embedding module (ETEM), which allows it to incorporate these advanced features into the track query layer embeddings. This integration ensures that the model not only tracks visible objects but also accurately predicts the trajectories of occluded ones, much like the human visual system. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple datasets, including MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack, where it achieves impressive tracking metrics--82.0 MOTA and 66.3 HOTA on the MOT17 dataset, 81.7 MOTA and 65.8 HOTA on the MOT20 dataset, and 93.2 MOTA and 74.2 HOTA on the DanceTrack dataset. Notably, MOTE excels in reducing identity switches and maintaining consistent tracking in complex real-world scenarios with frequent occlusions, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods across all tested benchmarks.