Toan Van Nguyen, Rasmus G. K. Christiansen, Dirk Kraft +1cs.CV cs.RO
Multi-object tracking (MOT) involves maintaining consistent target identities as objects dynamically enter and leave a scene. Deterministic approaches, such as tracking-by-detection with data association, produce reproducible results and are computationally efficient, but they rely heavily on motion models and are sensitive to noisy detections that can lead to association errors. In contrast, stochastic methods explicitly model uncertainty and can better handle complex non-linear dynamics, albeit at the cost of increased computational complexity and variability arising from random sampling. This paper presents an online MOT framework that integrates deterministic and stochastic principles to achieve robust tracking under uncertainty. Furthermore, a novel track-to-detection matching approach is introduced to enhance scalability with increasing target numbers while supporting group tracking. The tracking inference mechanism employs a tracklet that includes identifiers, states, velocities, track penalties and track ages of targets, supporting a systematic tracking pipeline. Each target is associated with a stochastic particle set to compute the matching cost to detections. Reference implementations of the proposed approach and baseline trackers can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack3.
Reliable visual data association is fundamental to visual SLAM (V-SLAM), as it directly determines the quality of the camera pose estimation and map consistency. However, the handcrafted descriptors used by most mature real-time systems degrade under illumination and viewpoint changes, while learning-based front-ends that address this weakness typically require replacing the extraction-and-matching pipeline and introduce substantial computational overhead. Descriptor enhancement offers a compromise by refining existing descriptors within their original format, yet current methods rely on simplified attention mechanisms whose limited contextual modeling constrains the achievable matching quality. To resolve this trade-off between contextual expressiveness and efficiency, we propose Desc++, a lightweight enhancement module that jointly encodes descriptor representations and keypoint geometry and aggregates spatial context through a hybrid architecture that combines order-agnostic global attention with geometry-aware sequential modeling in linear time. The enhanced descriptors retain their original dimensionality and matching interface, enabling integration into deployed V-SLAM systems without modifying the pipeline. Experiments across descriptor matching, correspondence analysis, and system-level benchmarks with four different V-SLAM systems demonstrate that Desc++ improves matching accuracy over the state-of-the-art enhancement method, translates these gains into more accurate and stable trajectory estimation, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for practical integration into existing real-time V-SLAM pipelines.
Visual SLAM is a well-established technology utilized in a wide range of real-world applications. However, its performance still degrades under challenging visual conditions, such as low texture, severe motion blur, and poor illumination. Systems based on deep learning outperform classical geometry-based ones and achieve state-of-the-art results by combining learned 2D data association and uncertainty with differentiable geometric optimization in recurrent architectures. Still, it remains unclear exactly which components are fundamentally responsible for this success. In this paper, we ask: Is the superior performance of deep learning-based systems driven primarily by learned 2D data association, the combination of learned 2D data association and uncertainty, or the recurrent architecture itself? We investigate this question empirically by conducting a controlled study. Our findings reveal that the success of DL-based V-SLAM systems hinges on learned 2D data association and uncertainty rather than their recurrent architecture, underscoring the necessity of learning-based paradigms for the design of these components. Upon acceptance, the code will be released as open source.