Realtime Vehicle Tracking Method Based on YOLOv5 + DeepSORT

In actual traffic scenarios, the environment is complex and constantly changing, with many vehicles that have substantial similarities, posing significant challenges to vehicle tracking research based on deep learning. To address these challenges, this article investigates the application of the DeepSORT (simple online and realtime tracking with a deep association metric) multitarget tracking algorithm in vehicle tracking. Due to the strong dependence of the DeepSORT algorithm on target detection, a YOLOv5s_DSC vehicle detection algorithm based on the YOLOv5s algorithm is proposed, which provides accurate and fast vehicle detection data to the DeepSORT algorithm. Compared to YOLOv5s, YOLOv5s_DSC has no more than a 1% difference in optimal mAP0.5 (mean average precision), precision rate, and recall rate, while reducing the number of parameters by 23.5%, the amount of computation by 32.3%, the size of the weight file by 20%, and increasing the average processing speed of each image by 18.8%. After integrating the DeepSORT algorithm, the processing speed of YOLOv5s_DSC + DeepSORT reaches up to 25 FPS, and the system exhibits better robustness to occlusion.