SeaTrack: Rethinking Observation-Centric SORT for Robust Nearshore Multiple Object Tracking

Nearshore Multiple Object Tracking (NMOT) aims to locate and associate nearshore objects. Current approaches utilize Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) and radar to accomplish this task. However, video signals can describe the visual appearance of nearshore objects without prior information such as identity, location, or motion. In addition, sea clutter will not affect the capture of living objects by visual sensors. Recognizing this, we analyzed three key long-term challenges of the vision-based NMOT and proposed a tracking pipeline that relies solely on motion information. Maritime objects are highly susceptible to being obscured or submerged by waves, resulting in fragmented tracklets. We first introduced guiding modulation to address the long-term occlusion and interaction of maritime objects. Subsequently, we modeled confidence, altitude, and angular momentum to mitigate the effects of motion blur, ringing, and overshoot artifacts to observations in unstable imaging environments. Additionally, we designed a motion fusion mechanism that combines long-term macro tracklets with short-term fine-grained tracklets. This correction mechanism helps reduce the estimation variance of the Kalman Filter (KF) to alleviate the substantial nonlinear motion of maritime objects. We call this pipeline SeaTrack, which remains simple, online, and real-time, demonstrating excellent performance and scalability in benchmark evaluations.