Learning a Neural Association Network for Self-supervised Multi-Object Tracking


Shuai Li (University of Bonn), Michael Burke (Monash University), Subramanian Ramamoorthy (University of Edinburgh), Juergen Gall (University of Bonn)
The 35th British Machine Vision Conference
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Abstract

This paper introduces a novel framework to learn data association for multi-object tracking in a self-supervised manner. Fully-supervised learning methods are known to achieve excellent tracking performances, but acquiring identity-level annotations is tedious and time-consuming. Motivated by the fact that in real-world scenarios object motion can be usually represented by a Markov process, we present a novel expectation maximization (EM) algorithm that trains a neural network to associate detections for tracking, without requiring prior knowledge of their temporal correspondences. At the core of our method lies a neural Kalman filter, with an observation model conditioned on associations of detections parameterized by a neural network. Given a batch of frames as input, data associations between detections from adjacent frames are predicted by a neural network followed by a Sinkhorn normalization that determines the assignment probabilities of detections to states. Kalman smoothing is then used to obtain the marginal probability of observations given the inferred states, producing a training objective to maximize this marginal probability using gradient descent. The proposed framework is fully differentiable, allowing the underlying neural model to be trained end-to-end. We evaluate our approach on the challenging MOT17, MOT20, and BDD100K datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results in comparison to self-supervised trackers using public detections.

Citation

@inproceedings{Li_2025_BMVC,
author    = {Shuai Li and Michael Burke and Subramanian Ramamoorthy and Juergen Gall},
title     = {Learning a Neural Association Network for Self-supervised Multi-Object Tracking},
booktitle = {36th British Machine Vision Conference 2025, {BMVC} 2025, Sheffield, UK, November 24-27, 2025},
publisher = {BMVA},
year      = {2025},
url       = {https://bmva-archive.org.uk/bmvc/2025/assets/papers/Paper_762/paper.pdf}
}


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