Pedestrian tracking method based on S-YOFEO framework in complex scene

A real-time stable multi-target tracking method based on the enhanced You Only Look Once-v8 (YOLOv8) and the optimized Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep association metric (DeepSORT) for real-time stable multi-target tracking (S-YOFEO) is proposed to address the issue of target ID transformation and loss caused by the increase of practical background complexity. The complexity of the real-world context poses a great challenge to multi-target tracking systems. Changes due to weather or lighting conditions, as well as the presence of numerous visually similar objects, can lead to target ID switching and tracking loss, thus affecting the system’s reliability. In addition, the unpredictability of pedestrian movement increases the difficulty of maintaining consistent and accurate tracking. For the purpose of further enhancing the processing capability of small-scale features, a small target detection head is first introduced to the detection layer of YOLOv8 in this paper with the aim of collecting more detailed information by increasing the detection resolution of YOLOv8 to ensure precise and fast detection. Secondly, the Omni-Scale Network (OSNet) feature extraction network is implemented to enable accurate and efficient fusion of the extracted complex and comparable feature information, taking into account the restricted computational power of DeepSORT’s original feature extraction network. Again, addressing the limitations of traditional Kalman filtering in nonlinear motion trajectory prediction, a novel adaptive forgetting Kalman filter algorithm (FSA) is devised to enhance the precision of model prediction and the effectiveness of parameter updates to adjust to the uncertain movement speed and trajectory of pedestrians in real scenarios. Following that, an accurate and stable association matching process is obtained by substituting Efficient-Intersection over Union (EIOU) for Complete-Intersection over Union (CIOU) in DeepSORT to boost the convergence speed and matching effect during association matching. Last but not least, One-Shot Aggregation (OSA) is presented as the trajectory feature extractor to deal with the various noise interferences in complex scenes. OSA is highly sensitive to information of different scales, and its one-time aggregation property substantially decreases the computational overhead of the model. According to the trial results, S-YOFEO has made some developments as its precision can reach 78.2% and its speed can reach 56.0 frames per second (FPS), which fully meets the demand for efficient and accurate tracking in actual complex traffic environments. Through this significant increase in performance, S-YOFEO can contribute to the development of more reliable and efficient tracking systems, which will have a profound impact on a wide range of industries and promote intelligent transformation and upgrading.