Multiple vehicle and people tracking in aerial imagery using stack of micro single-object-tracking CNNs

Abstract

Geo-referenced real-time vehicle and person tracking in aerial imagery has a variety of applications such as traffic and large-scale event monitoring, disaster management, and also for input into predictive traffic and crowd models. However, object tracking in aerial imagery is still an unsolved challenging problem due to the tiny size of the objects as well as different scales and the limited temporal resolution of geo-referenced datasets. In this work, we propose a new approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to track multiple vehicles and people in aerial image sequences. As the large number of objects in aerial images can exponentially increase the processing demands in multiple object tracking scenarios, the proposed approach utilizes the stack of micro CNNs, where each micro CNN is responsible for a single-object tracking task. We call our approach Stack of Micro-Single-Object-Tracking CNNs (SMSOT-CNN). More precisely, using a two-stream CNN, we extract a set of features from two consecutive frames for each object, with the given location of the object in the previous frame. Then, we assign each MSOT-CNN the extracted features of each object to predict the object location in the current frame. We train and validate the proposed approach on the vehicle and person sets of the KIT AIS dataset of object tracking in aerial image sequences. Results indicate the accurate and time-efficient tracking of multiple vehicles and people by the proposed approach.