Similarity based person re-identification for multi-object tracking using deep Siamese network

Abstract

The process of object tracking involves consistently identifying each instance across frames depending on initial set of object detection(s). Moreover, in multiple object tracking (MOT), the process through tracking-by-detection paradigm consists of performing two common steps consecutively, which are detection and data association. In MOT, it is targeted to associate detections across frames by localizing and identifying all objects of interest. MOT algorithms further keep tracking even the most challenging issues such as revisiting the same view, missing detections, occlusion and temporarily unseen objects, same-appearance objects coexisting in the same frame occur. Hence, re-identification (re-id) appears to be the most powerful tool for assigning the correct identities to each individual instance when aforementioned issues arise. In this work, we propose a similarity-based person re-id framework, called SAT, using a Siamese neural network via shared weights. Once detections are obtained from the backbone SAT applies a Siamese feature extraction model and then we introduce a similarity array for assessing tracklet(s) and detection(s). We examine the performance of SAT on several benchmarks with extensive experiments and statistical tests, where we improve the current state-of-the-art according to commonly used performance metrics with higher accuracy, less ID switches, less false positive and negative rates.