Context aware detection and tracking

This paper presents a novel approach to incorporate multiple contextual factors into a tracking process, for the purpose of reducing false positive detections. While much previous work has focused on improving object detection on static images using context, these have not been integrated into the tracking process. Our hypothesis is that a significant improvement can result from the use of context in dynamically influencing the linking of object detections, during the tracking process. To verify this hypothesis, we augment a state of the art dynamic programming based tracker with contextual information by reformulating the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation formulation. This formulation introduces contextual factors that first of all augment detection strengths and secondly provides temporal context. We allow both these types of factors to contribute organically to the linking process by learning the relative contribution of each of these factors jointly during a gradient decent based optimisation process. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach contributes to a significantly superior performance on a recent challenging video dataset, which captures complex scenes with a wide range of object types and diverse backgrounds.