Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been notoriously difficult to evaluate. Previous metrics overemphasize the importance of either detection or association. To address this, we present a novel MOT evaluation metric, HOTA (Higher Order Tracking Accuracy), which explicitly balances the effect of performing accurate detection, association and localization into a single unified metric for comparing trackers. HOTA decomposes into a family of sub-metrics which are able to evaluate each of five basic error types separately, which enables clear analysis of tracking performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of HOTA on the MOTChallenge benchmark, and show that it is able to capture important aspects of MOT performance not previously taken into account by established metrics. Furthermore, we show HOTA scores better align with human visual evaluation of tracking performance.
@article{arxiv.2009.07736,
title = {HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking},
author = {Jonathon Luiten and Aljosa Osep and Patrick Dendorfer and Philip Torr and Andreas Geiger and Laura Leal-Taixe and Bastian Leibe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.07736},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Pre-print. Accepted for Publication in the International Journal of Computer Vision, 19 August 2020. Code is available at https://github.com/JonathonLuiten/HOTA-metrics