A cost function approach for multi-human tracking

In this paper, we propose a cost function approach for multi-human tracking. We first build short reliable trajectories based on human appearance and position. Here, we apply topic model to represent human appearance. The appearance of each person can be considered as topic distribution. Then, we compute the cost function for each pair of reliable trajectories in the time sliding window to estimate whether two trajectories can be associated. The cost function includes four parts, appearance cost, motion direction cost, object size cost and distance cost. The experimental results show that our approach has better performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches.