Challenges of Ground Truth Evaluation of Multi-target Tracking

Evaluating multi-target tracking based on ground truth data is a surprisingly challenging task. Erroneous or ambiguous ground truth annotations, numerous evaluation protocols, and the lack of standardized benchmarks make a direct quantitative comparison of different tracking approaches rather difficult. The goal of this paper is to raise awareness of common pitfalls related to objective ground truth evaluation. We investigate the influence of different annotations, evaluation software, and training procedures using several publicly available resources, and point out the limitations of current definitions of evaluation metrics. Finally, we argue that the development an extensive standardized benchmark for multi-target tracking is an essential step toward more objective comparison of tracking approaches.