Spatial–Semantic and Temporal Attention Mechanism-Based Online Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a crucial role in various platforms. Occlusion and insertion among targets, complex backgrounds and higher real-time requirements increase the difficulty of MOT problems. Most state-of-the-art MOT approaches adopt the tracking-by-detection strategy, which relies on compute-intensive sliding windows or anchoring schemes to detect matching targets or candidates in each frame. In this work, we introduce a more efficient and effective spatial–temporal attention scheme to track multiple objects in various scenarios. Using a semantic-feature-based spatial attention mechanism and a novel Motion Model, we address the insertion and location of candidates. Some online-learned target-specific convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were used to estimate target occlusion and classify by adapting the appearance model. A temporal attention mechanism was adopted to update the online module by balancing current and history frames. Extensive experiments were performed on Karlsruhe Institute of Technologyand Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) benchmarks and an Armored Target Tracking Dataset (ATTD) built for ground-armored targets. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved outstanding tracking performance and met the actual application requirements.