Achieving Adaptive Visual Multi-Object Tracking with Unscented Kalman Filter

As an essential part of intelligent monitoring, behavior recognition, automatic driving, and others, the challenge of multi-object tracking is still to ensure tracking accuracy and robustness, especially in complex occlusion environments. Aiming at the issues of the occlusion, background noise, and motion state violent change for multi-object in a complex scene, an improved DeepSORT algorithm based on YOLOv5 is proposed for multi-object tracking to enhance the speed and accuracy of tracking. Firstly, a general object motion model is devised, which is similar to the variable acceleration motion model, and a multi-object tracking framework with the general motion model is established. Then, the latest YOLOv5 algorithm, which has satisfactory detection accuracy, is utilized to obtain the object information as the input of multi-object tracking. An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is proposed to estimate the motion state of multi-object to solve nonlinear errors. In addition, the adaptive factor is introduced to evaluate observation noise and detect abnormal observations so as to adaptively adjust the innovation covariance matrix. Finally, an improved DeepSORT algorithm for multi-object tracking is formed to promote robustness and accuracy. Extensive experiments are carried out on the MOT16 data set, and we compare the proposed algorithm with the DeepSORT algorithm. The results indicate that the speed and precision of the improved DeepSORT are increased by 4.75% and 2.30%, respectively. Especially in the MOT16 of the dynamic camera, the improved DeepSORT shows better performance.