ST-TrackNet: A Multiple-Object Tracking Network Using Spatio-Temporal Information

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) is a crucial component in autonomous driving systems. However, inaccurate object detection is always the bottleneck for MOT. Most detectors are not designed to take the temporal information across consecutive frames into consideration. To take advantage of such information, we design a novel data representation, the spatio-temporal (ST) map, which collects a batch of detection results spatio-temporally, and we train a novel network, ST-TrackNet, to assign predicted track IDs to each positive detection across a sequence. With our ST map detection fed into the tracker, the correlation of objects between adjacent frames becomes prominent, which improves the performance of the tracker in the data association step. Moreover, the long-term trajectory in a sequence also helps to refine the detection results. We train and evaluate our network on the KITTI dataset, a CARLA simulation dataset, and a dataset recorded in a factory environment. Our approach generally achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art. © 2022 IEEE.