An Online Learned Elementary Grouping Model for Multi-target Tracking

We introduce an online approach to learn possible elementary groups (groups that contain only two targets) for inferring high level context that can be used to improve multi-target tracking in a data-association based framework. Unlike most existing association-based tracking approaches that use only low level information (e.g., time, appearance, and motion) to build the affinity model and consider each target as an independent agent, we online learn social grouping behavior to provide additional information for producing more robust tracklets affinities. Social grouping behavior of pairwise targets is first learned from confident tracklets and encoded in a disjoint grouping graph. The grouping graph is further completed with the help of group tracking. The proposed method is efficient, handles group merge and split, and can be easily integrated into any basic affinity model. We evaluate our approach on two public datasets, and show significant improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods.