TOPIC: A Parallel Association Paradigm for Multi-Object Tracking under Complex Motions and Diverse Scenes

Video data and algorithms have been driving advances in multi-object tracking (MOT). While existing MOT datasets focus on occlusion and appearance similarity, complex motion patterns are widespread yet overlooked. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset called BEE23 to highlight complex motions. Identity association algorithms have long been the focus of MOT research. Existing trackers can be categorized into two association paradigms: single-feature paradigm (based on either motion or appearance feature) and serial paradigm (one feature serves as secondary while the other is primary). However, these paradigms are incapable of fully utilizing different features. In this paper, we propose a parallel paradigm and present the Two rOund Parallel matchIng meChanism (TOPIC) to implement it. The TOPIC leverages both motion and appearance features and can adaptively select the preferable one as the assignment metric based on motion level. Moreover, we provide an Attention-based Appearance Reconstruct Module (AARM) to reconstruct appearance feature embeddings, thus enhancing the representation of appearance features. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets and BEE23. Notably, our proposed parallel paradigm surpasses the performance of existing association paradigms by a large margin, e.g., reducing false negatives by 12% to 51% compared to the single-feature association paradigm. The introduced dataset and association paradigm in this work offers a fresh perspective for advancing the MOT field. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/holmescao/TOPICTrack.