Fast Timeline Based Multi Object Online Tracking

Abstract Fast state-of-the-art multi-object-tracking (MOT) schemes, such as reported in challenges MOT16 and Mot20, perform tracking on a single sensor, often couple tracking and detection, support only one kind of object representation or don’t take varying latencies and update rates into account. We propose a fast generic MOT system for use in real world applications which is capable of tracking objects from different sensor / detector types with their respective latencies and update rates. An SORT inspired online tracking scheme is extended by time awareness using timelines as unifying concept. The system supports different object, sensor and filter and tracking types by modularizing and generalizing the online tracking scheme, while ensuring high performance using an efficient data-oriented C++-template-based implementation. Using the proposed system we achieve, with comparable evaluation metrics, framerates up to ten times higher than the fastest MOT schemes publicly listed for the axis-aligned bounding-box tracking challenges MOT17 and MOT20.