Online multitarget tracking system for autonomous vehicles using discriminative dictionary learning with embedded auto‐encoder algorithm

Abstract

With the advancements in 5G network and mobile edge computing technology, autonomous vehicle technology has gained new development opportunities. Multitarget tracking becomes the research hotspots in autonomous vehicles. Since many factors such as motion blur, partial occlusion, and illumination changes affect the performance of target tracking, the problem of target tracking is still an open topic. In this article, inspired by the strong discriminative ability of dictionary learning, the discriminative dictionary learning with embedded auto‐encoder (DDLEA) algorithm is developed for the multitarget tracking system. The DDLEA algorithm integrates the auto‐encoder into the dictionary learning framework and learns sparse representations while preserving the local structure and discriminative information of data. The learned dictionary model has the strong recognition ability. Further, a multitarget tracking system is developed based on the proposed DDLEA algorithm and the hierarchical data association scheme. Based on the target confidence in the STKSVD model, the hierarchical data association method first uses the Hungarian algorithm to complete the preliminary matching of high confidence targets, and then further tracks the low confidence targets to improve the tracking ability. Experiments are carried out the public MOT 2015 dataset. Compared with several popular multitarget tracking algorithms, the tracking performance of our system is satisfactory.