Title
An information theoretic approach for tracker performance evaluation
Abstract
Automated tracking of vehicles and people is essential for the effective utilization of imagery in wide area surveillance applications. In order to determine the best tracking algorithm and parameters for a given application, a comprehensive evaluation procedure is required. However, despite half a century of research in multi-target tracking, there is no consensus on how to score the overall performance of these trackers. Existing evaluation approaches assess tracker performance through measures of correspondence between ground truth tracks and system tracks using metrics such as track detection rate, track completeness, track fragmentation rate, and track ID change rate. However, each of these only provides a partial measure of performance and no good method exists to combine them into a holistic metric. Towards this end, this paper presents a pair of information theoretic metrics with similar behavior to the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves of signal detection theory. Overall performance is evaluated with the percentage of truth information that a tracker captured and the total amount of false information that it reported. Information content is quantified through conditional entropy and mutual information computations using numerical estimates of the probability of association between the truth and the system tracks. This paper demonstrates how these information quality metrics provide a comprehensive evaluation of overall tracker performance and how they can be used to perform tracker comparisons and parameter tuning on wide-area surveillance imagery and other applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/ICCV.2009.5459275
ICCV
Keywords
DocType
Volume
multi-target tracking,tracker performance evaluation,target tracking,roc curves,receiver operating characteristic,vehicles,automated vehicle tracking,information theory,wide area surveillance,performance evaluation,signal detection theory,automated people tracking,holistic metric,information theoretic approach,signal detection,probability,video surveillance,measurement,entropy,probability density function,pathology,image reconstruction,roc curve,information content,ground truth,conditional entropy,mutual information,information quality,receiver operator characteristic
Conference
2009
Issue
ISSN
ISBN
1
1550-5499 E-ISBN : 978-1-4244-4419-9
978-1-4244-4419-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
1.11
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Edward K. Kao112310.06
Matthew P. Daggett2161.79
Michael B. Hurley3936.44