SDOF-Tracker: Fast and Accurate Multiple Human Tracking by Skipped-Detection and Optical-Flow

Multiple human tracking is a fundamental problem in understanding the context of a visual scene. Although both accuracy and speed are required in real-world applications, recent tracking methods based on deep learning focus on accuracy and require a substantial amount of running time. We aim to improve tracking running speeds by performing human detections at certain frame intervals because it accounts for most of the running time. The question is how to maintain accuracy while skipping human detection. In this paper, we propose a method that interpolates the detection results by using an optical flow, which is based on the fact that someone's appearance does not change much between adjacent frames. To maintain the tracking accuracy, we introduce robust interest point detection within the human regions and a tracking termination metric defined by the distribution of the interest points. On the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets in the MOTChallenge, the proposed SDOF-Tracker achieved the best performance in terms of total running time while maintaining the MOTA metric. Our code is available at https://github.com/hitottiez/sdof-tracker.