Boosting Multi-hypothesis Tracking by Means of Instance-Specific Models

In this paper we present a visual person tracking-by-detection system based on on-line-learned instance-specific information along with the kinematic relation of measurements provided by a generic person-category detector. The proposed system is able to initialize tracks on individual persons and start learning their appearance even in crowded situations and does not require that a person enters the scene separately. For that purpose we integrate the process of learning instance-specific models into a standard MHT-framework. The capability of the system to eliminate detections-to-object association ambiguities occurring from missed detections or false ones is demonstrated by experiments for counting and tracking applications using very long video sequences on challenging outdoor scenarios.