Strong-TransCenter: Improved Multi-Object Tracking based on Transformers with Dense Representations

Transformer networks have been a focus of research in many fields in recent years, being able to surpass the state-of-the-art performance in different computer vision tasks. However, in the task of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), leveraging the power of Transformers remains relatively unexplored. Among the pioneering efforts in this domain, TransCenter, a Transformer-based MOT architecture with dense object queries, demonstrated exceptional tracking capabilities while maintaining reasonable runtime. Nonetheless, one critical aspect in MOT, track displacement estimation, presents room for enhancement to further reduce association errors. In response to this challenge, our paper introduces a novel improvement to TransCenter. We propose a post-processing mechanism grounded in the Track-by-Detection paradigm, aiming to refine the track displacement estimation. Our approach involves the integration of a carefully designed Kalman filter, which incorporates Transformer outputs into measurement error estimation, and the use of an embedding network for target re-identification. This combined strategy yields substantial improvement in the accuracy and robustness of the tracking process. We validate our contributions through comprehensive experiments on the MOTChallenge datasets MOT17 and MOT20, where our proposed approach outperforms other Transformer-based trackers. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amitgalor18/STC_Tracker