Multi-Object Tracking Using Dual-Attention with Regional-Representation

Abstract

Nowadays, researchers have shown convolutional neural network (CNN) can achieve an improved performance in multi-object tracking (MOT) by performing detection and re-identification (ReID) simultaneously. Many models have been created to overcome challenges and bring the state-of-the-art performance to a new level. However, due to the fact the CNN models only utilize feature from a local region, the potential of the model has not been fully utilized. The long range dependencies in spatial domain are usually difficult for a network to capture. Hence, how to obtain such dependencies has become the new focus in MOT field. One approach is to adopt the self-attention mechanism named transformer. Since it was successfully transferred from natural language processing to computer vision, many recent works have implemented it to their trackers. With the introduce of global information, the trackers become more robust and stable. There are also traditional methods which are re-designed in the manner of CNN and achieve satisfying performance such as optical flow. It can generate a correlated relation between feature maps and also obtain non-local information. However, the introduces of these mechanism usually causes a significant surge in computational power and memory. They also requires huge amount of epochs to train thus the training time is largely increased. To solve this issue, we propose a new method to gather non-local information based on the existing self-attention methods, we named it dual attention with regional-representation, which significantly reduces the training time as well as the inference time, but only causes a small increase in computational memory and are able to run with a reasonable speed. Our experiments shows this module can help the ReID be more stable to improve the performance in different tasks.