Beyond Appearance: A Multi-cue Framework and Large-scale Benchmark for Pedestrian Association and Tracking on Mobile Aerial-Ground Platforms

Multi-view Multi-object Association and Tracking (MvMoAT) associates objects across camera views and tracks them over time, supporting identity persistence and forensic trajectory reconstruction in multi-platform cooperative perception. Unlike conventional multiple object tracking, MvMoAT faces frequent viewpoint shifts that distort appearance and undermine cross-view association and temporal tracking. We propose FUSION, a viewpoint-robust Feature Unification framework for multi-view aSsociation and IdentificatiON. Its Multi-cue Adaptive Combination (MAC) module adaptively integrates viewpoint-invariant cues with appearance features to improve cross-view association, while Online Multi-view Feature Synchronization (OMFS) aggregates pedestrian features across historical and cross-view frames for temporally consistent tracking. We also introduce RealMvMoAT, a large-scale benchmark featuring substantial inter- and intra-camera viewpoint variation. It contains 504.9K frames from 7 cameras (5 UAV and 2 ground views) across 10 scenes, with over 7.3M identity-labeled bounding boxes. All cameras exhibit random and substantial motion. To the best of our knowledge, RealMvMoAT is the largest MvMoAT dataset to date. Its scale, viewpoint diversity, complex platform motion, and realistic trajectories provide a comprehensive resource for future research. Experiments on RealMvMoAT and six public benchmarks show that FUSION achieves state-of-the-art performance.