ReSORT: an ID-recovery multi-face tracking method for surveillance cameras

As an improvement over the standard simple online real-time tracking (SORT) method, DeepSORT introduces a cascade matching mechanism to track objects during a certain period of occlusion, effectively reducing the number of identity (ID) switches. However, DeepSORT lacks the capability of lost-identities recovery, which enables robustness and performance in face recognition systems. To address the issue, we propose a novel multi-face tracking method, named ReSORT, that can recover lost identities. Our method removes the cascade matching block in DeepSORT and extends a similarity matching (SM) block after the Kalman filter to assign uncertain tracks to their probable tracking IDs. Such arrangement significantly reduces the processing time while maintaining the longevity of tracking IDs. The SM block functions by storing existing facial features and comparing the similarity between the new and the existing facial features, enabling ReSORT to recover the lost IDs or IDs from other cameras. To benchmark the ID-recovery ability, we introduce three new metrics, calling IDnew, TIDRate, and TReRate. We also produce face tracking annotations for three public surveillance camera datasets, i.e., LAB, MSU-AVIS, and ChokePoint. Extensive experiments conducted on the three datasets with various resolutions and frame-rates settings demonstrate the superiority of ReSORT over DeepSORT, i.e. reducing the identity switches by average 36.38%, and the processing time by 5.19 times. Source code and annotations of all three datasets are available at https://github.com/tantm97/ReSORT. © 2021 IEEE.