Improving trajectory continuity in drone-based crowd monitoring using a set of minimal-cost techniques and deep discriminative correlation filters

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ptak, Bartosz, Kraft, Marek
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ptak, Bartosz
Kraft, Marek
author_facet Ptak, Bartosz
Kraft, Marek
contents Drone-based crowd monitoring is the key technology for applications in surveillance, public safety, and event management. However, maintaining tracking continuity and consistency remains a significant challenge. Traditional detection-assignment tracking methods struggle with false positives, false negatives, and frequent identity switches, leading to degraded counting accuracy and making in-depth analysis impossible. This paper introduces a point-oriented online tracking algorithm that improves trajectory continuity and counting reliability in drone-based crowd monitoring. Our method builds on the Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) framework, replacing the original bounding-box assignment with a point-distance metric. The algorithm is enhanced with three cost-effective techniques: camera motion compensation, altitude-aware assignment, and classification-based trajectory validation. Further, Deep Discriminative Correlation Filters (DDCF) that re-use spatial feature maps from localisation algorithms for increased computational efficiency through neural network resource sharing are integrated to refine object tracking by reducing noise and handling missed detections. The proposed method is evaluated on the DroneCrowd and newly shared UP-COUNT-TRACK datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements in tracking metrics, reducing counting errors to 23% and 15%, respectively. The results also indicate a significant reduction of identity switches while maintaining high tracking accuracy, outperforming baseline online trackers and even an offline greedy optimisation method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20234
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving trajectory continuity in drone-based crowd monitoring using a set of minimal-cost techniques and deep discriminative correlation filters
Ptak, Bartosz
Kraft, Marek
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Drone-based crowd monitoring is the key technology for applications in surveillance, public safety, and event management. However, maintaining tracking continuity and consistency remains a significant challenge. Traditional detection-assignment tracking methods struggle with false positives, false negatives, and frequent identity switches, leading to degraded counting accuracy and making in-depth analysis impossible. This paper introduces a point-oriented online tracking algorithm that improves trajectory continuity and counting reliability in drone-based crowd monitoring. Our method builds on the Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) framework, replacing the original bounding-box assignment with a point-distance metric. The algorithm is enhanced with three cost-effective techniques: camera motion compensation, altitude-aware assignment, and classification-based trajectory validation. Further, Deep Discriminative Correlation Filters (DDCF) that re-use spatial feature maps from localisation algorithms for increased computational efficiency through neural network resource sharing are integrated to refine object tracking by reducing noise and handling missed detections. The proposed method is evaluated on the DroneCrowd and newly shared UP-COUNT-TRACK datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements in tracking metrics, reducing counting errors to 23% and 15%, respectively. The results also indicate a significant reduction of identity switches while maintaining high tracking accuracy, outperforming baseline online trackers and even an offline greedy optimisation method.
title Improving trajectory continuity in drone-based crowd monitoring using a set of minimal-cost techniques and deep discriminative correlation filters
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20234