Extending Multi-Object Tracking systems to better exploit appearance and 3D information

Tracking multiple objects in real time is essential for a variety of real-world applications, with self-driving industry being at the foremost. This work involves exploiting temporally varying appearance and motion information for tracking. Siamese networks have recently become highly successful at appearance based single object tracking and Recurrent Neural Networks have started dominating both motion and appearance based tracking. Our work focuses on combining Siamese networks and RNNs to exploit appearance and motion information respectively to build a joint system capable of real time multi-object tracking. We further explore heuristics based constraints for tracking in the Birds Eye View Space for efficiently exploiting 3D information as a constrained optimization problem for track prediction.

Bipartite Conditional Random Fields for Panoptic Segmentation

We tackle the panoptic segmentation problem with a conditional random field (CRF) model. Panoptic segmentation involves assigning a semantic label and an instance label to each pixel of a given image. At each pixel, the semantic label and the instance label should be compatible. Furthermore, a good panoptic segmentation should have a number of other desirable properties such as the spatial and color consistency of the labeling (similar looking neighboring pixels should have the same semantic label and the instance label). To tackle this problem, we propose a CRF model, named Bipartite CRF or BCRF, with two types of random variables for semantic and instance labels. In this formulation, various energies are defined within and across the two types of random variables to encourage a consistent panoptic segmentation. We propose a mean-field-based efficient inference algorithm for solving the CRF and empirically show its convergence properties. This algorithm is fully differentiable, and therefore, BCRF inference can be included as a trainable module in a deep network. In the experimental evaluation, we quantitatively and qualitatively show that the BCRF yields superior panoptic segmentation results in practice.