We propose a novel Transformer-based module to address the data association problem for multi-object tracking. From detections obtained by a pretrained detector, this module uses only coordinates from bounding boxes to estimate an affinity score between pairs of tracks extracted from two distinct temporal windows. This module, named TWiX, is trained on sets of tracks with the objective of discriminating pairs of tracks coming from the same object from those which are not. Our module does not use the intersection over union measure, nor does it requires any motion priors or any camera motion compensation technique. By inserting TWiX within an online cascade matching pipeline, our tracker C-TWiX achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DanceTrack and KITTIMOT datasets, and gets competitive results on the MOT17 dataset. The code will be made available upon publication on the website https://mehdimiah.com/twix . • Our Transformer-based model, TWiX, can learn to associate objects using only coordinates. • We show that motion priors or intersection-over-union measure are not required for tracking. Using pairs of tracks is sufficient. • Tracking with TWiX gives competitive or state-of-the-results on several datasets.

Spatiotemporal traffic data imputation is of great significance in intelligent transportation systems and data-driven decision-making processes. To perform efficient learning and accurate reconstruction from partially observed traffic data, we assert the importance of characterizing both global and local trends in time series. In the literature, substantial works have demonstrated the effectiveness of utilizing the low-rank property of traffic data by matrix/tensor completion models. In this study, we first introduce a Laplacian kernel to temporal regularization for characterizing local trends in traffic time series, which can be formulated as a circular convolution. Then, we develop a low-rank Laplacian convolutional representation (LCR) model by putting the circulant matrix nuclear norm and the Laplacian kernelized temporal regularization together, which is proved to meet a unified framework that has a fast Fourier transform (FFT) solution in log-linear time complexity. Through extensive experiments on several traffic datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of LCR over several baseline models for imputing traffic time series of various time series behaviors (e.g., data noises and strong/weak periodicity) and reconstructing sparse speed fields of vehicular traffic flow. The proposed LCR model is also an efficient solution to large-scale traffic data imputation over the existing imputation models.

The problem of discovering interpretable dynamic patterns from spatiotemporal data is studied in this paper. For that purpose, we develop a time-varying reduced-rank vector autoregression (VAR) model whose coefficient matrices are parameterized by low-rank tensor factorization. Benefiting from the tensor factorization structure, the proposed model can simultaneously achieve model compression and pattern discovery. In particular, the proposed model allows one to characterize nonstationarity and time-varying system behaviors underlying spatiotemporal data. To evaluate the proposed model, extensive experiments are conducted on various spatiotemporal datasets representing different nonlinear dynamical systems, including fluid dynamics, sea surface temperature, USA surface temperature, and NYC taxi trips. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for analyzing spatiotemporal data and characterizing spatial/temporal patterns. In the spatial context, the spatial patterns can be automatically extracted and intuitively characterized by the spatial modes. In the temporal context, the complex time-varying system behaviors can be revealed by the temporal modes in the proposed model. Thus, our model lays an insightful foundation for understanding complex spatiotemporal data in real-world dynamical systems. The adapted datasets and Python implementation are publicly available athttps://github.com/xinychen/vars.

Spatiotemporal traffic time series (e.g., traffic volume/speed) collected from sensing systems are often incomplete with considerable corruption and large amounts of missing values, preventing users from harnessing the full power of the data. Missing data imputation has been a long-standing research topic and critical application for real-world intelligent transportation systems. A widely applied imputation method is low-rank matrix/tensor completion; however, the low-rank assumption only preserves the global structure while ignores the strong local consistency in spatiotemporal data. In this paper, we propose a low-rank autoregressive tensor completion (LATC) framework by introducing \textit{temporal variation} as a new regularization term into the completion of a third-order (sensor $\times$ time of day $\times$ day) tensor. The third-order tensor structure allows us to better capture the global consistency of traffic data, such as the inherent seasonality and day-to-day similarity. To achieve local consistency, we design the temporal variation by imposing an AR($p$) model for each time series with coefficients as learnable parameters. Different from previous spatial and temporal regularization schemes, the minimization of temporal variation can better characterize temporal generative mechanisms beyond local smoothness, allowing us to deal with more challenging scenarios such "blackout" missing. To solve the optimization problem in LATC, we introduce an alternating minimization scheme that estimates the low-rank tensor and autoregressive coefficients iteratively. We conduct extensive numerical experiments on several real-world traffic data sets, and our results demonstrate the effectiveness of LATC in diverse missing scenarios.

Human action recognition (HAR) in videos is a fundamental research topic in computer vision. It consists mainly in understanding actions performed by humans based on a sequence of visual observations. In recent years, HAR have witnessed significant progress, especially with the emergence of deep learning models. However, most of existing approaches for action recognition rely on information that is not always relevant for this task, and are limited in the way they fuse the temporal information. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human action recognition that encodes efficiently the most discriminative appearance information of an action with explicit attention on representative pose features, into a new compact grid representation. Our GRAR (Grid-based Representation for Action Recognition) method is tested on several benchmark datasets demonstrating that our model can accurately recognize human actions, despite intra-class appearance variations and occlusion challenges.

This paper addresses the problem of selecting appearance features for multiple object tracking (MOT) in urban scenes. Over the years, a large number of features has been used for MOT. However, it is not clear whether some of them are better than others. Commonly used features are color histograms, histograms of oriented gradients, deep features from convolutional neural networks and re-identification (ReID) features. In this study, we assess how good these features are at discriminating objects enclosed by a bounding box in urban scene tracking scenarios. Several affinity measures, namely the L1, L2and the Bhattacharyya distances, Rank-1 counts and the cosine similarity, are also assessed for their impact on the discriminative power of the features. Results on several datasets show that features from ReID networks are the best for discriminating instances from one another regardless of the quality of the detector. If a ReID model is not available, color histograms may be selected if the detector has a good recall and there are few occlusions; otherwise, deep features are more robust to detectors with lower recall.

Because of the large variability of road user appearance in an urban setting, it is very challenging to track all of them with the purpose of obtaining precise and reliable trajectories. However, obtaining the trajectories of the various road users is very useful for many transportation applications. It is particularly essential for any task that requires higher level behavior interpretation, including new safety diagnosis methods that rely on the observation of road user interactions without a collision and therefore do not require waiting for collisions to happen. In this paper, we propose a tracking method that has been specifically designed to track the various road users that may be encountered in an urban environment. Since road users have very diverse shapes and appearances, our proposed method starts from background subtraction to extract the potential a priori unknown road users. Each of these road users is then tracked using a collection of keypoints inside the detected foreground regions, which allows the interpolation of object locations even during object merges or occlusions. A finite state machine handles fragmentation, splitting, and merging of the road users to correct and improve the resulting object trajectories. The proposed tracker was tested on several urban intersection videos and is shown to outperform an existing reference tracker used in transportation research.

In this paper, we study the problem of detecting and tracking multiple objects of various types in outdoor urban traffic scenes. This problem is especially challenging due to the large variation of road user appearances. To handle that variation, our system uses background subtraction to detect moving objects. In order to build the object tracks, an object model is built and updated through time inside a state machine using feature points and spatial information. When an occlusion occurs between multiple objects, the positions of feature points at previous observations are used to estimate the positions and sizes of the individual occluded objects. Our Urban Tracker algorithm is validated on four outdoor urban videos involving mixed traffic that includes pedestrians, cars, large vehicles, etc. Our method compares favorably to a current state of the art feature-based tracker for urban traffic scenes on pedestrians and mixed traffic.

The importance of reducing the social and economic costs associated with traffic collisions can not be over-stated. The first goal of this research is to develop a method for automated road safety analysis using video sensors in order to address the problem of a dependency on the deteriorating collision data. The method will automate the extraction of traffic conflicts (near misses) from video sensor data. To our knowledge, there is limited research primarily applied to traffic conflicts. In this paper a method based on the clustering of vehicle trajectories is presented. The clustering uses a k-means approach with hidden Markov models and a simple heuristic to find the number of clusters automatically. Traffic conflicts can then be detected by identifying and adapting pairs of models of conflicting trajectories. The technique is demonstrated on real world video sequences of traffic conflicts.