Salient Feature Enhanced Multi-object Tracking with Soft-Sparse Attention in Transformer

Most existing transformer-based Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods use Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract features and then use a transformer to detect and track objects. However, feature extract networks in existing MOT methods cannot pay more attention to the salient regional features and capture their consecutive contextual information, resulting in the neglect of potential object areas during detection. And self-attention in the transformer generates extensive redundant attention areas, resulting in a weak correlation between detected and tracking objects during the tracking. In this paper, we propose a salient regional feature enhancement module (SFEM) to focus more on salient regional features and enhance the continuity of contextual features, it effectively avoids the neglect of some potential object areas due to occlusion and background interference. We further propose soft-sparse attention (SSA) in the transformer to strengthen the correlation between detected and tracking objects, it establishes an exact association between objects to reduce the object's ID switch. Experimental results on the datasets of MOT17 and MOT20 show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art metrics of MOTA, IDF1, and IDSw.