Scene-adaptive hierarchical data association and depth-invariant part-based appearance model for indoor multiple objects tracking

Indoor multi-tracking is more challenging compared with outdoor tasks due to frequent occlusion, view-truncation, severe scale change and pose variation, which may bring considerable unreliability and ambiguity to target representation and data association. So discriminative and reliable target representation is vital for accurate data association in multi-tracking. Pervious works always combine bunch of features to increase the discriminative power, but this is prone to error accumulation and unnecessary computational cost, which may increase ambiguity on the contrary. Moreover, reliability of a same feature in different scenes may vary a lot, especially for currently widespread network cameras, which are settled in various and complex indoor scenes, previous fixed feature selection schemes cannot meet general requirements. To properly handle these problems, first, we propose a scene-adaptive hierarchical data association scheme, which adaptively selects features with higher reliability on target representation in the applied scene, and gradually combines features to the minimum requirement of discriminating ambiguous targets; second, a novel depth-invariant part-based appearance model using RGB-D data is proposed which makes the appearance model robust to scale change, partial occlusion and view-truncation. The introduce of RGB-D data increases the diversity of features, which provides more types of features for feature selection in data association and enhances the final multi-tracking performance. We validate our method from several aspects including scene-adaptive feature selection scheme, hierarchical data association scheme and RGB-D based appearance modeling scheme in various indoor scenes, which demonstrates its effectiveness and efficiency on improving multi-tracking performances in various indoor scenes.