Exploring the Effectiveness of Appearance Descriptor in DeepSORT

Zilin Xiao, Yanan Sun

Abstract: Tracking-by-detection approaches have demonstrated their strength in addressing Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) problems. DeepSORT, one of the classical tracking-by-detection MOT methods, relies on a deep appearance descriptor to extract global appearance features of identities. Although the appearance descriptor acts as a key component of such tracking-by-detection methods, which is responsible for modeling appearance information, the relationship between it and tracking performance remains unclear, especially whether further improvements to it will be reflected in the tracking performance. To explore that, extensive experiments are conducted on the appearance descriptor by applying various traditional optimization methods. Furthermore, we propose an Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) strategy for the appearance descriptor named Genetic-SORT to assist exploration. The experimental results demonstrate that tracking performance fails to follow the improvements applied on the appearance descriptor and even shows a negative correlation, which is contrary to our intuition.