HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking
This addresses the problem of biased evaluation in MOT for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing metric frameworks.
The paper tackles the difficulty of evaluating Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) by introducing HOTA, a novel metric that balances detection, association, and localization into a single unified measure, and shows it aligns better with human visual evaluation on the MOTChallenge benchmark.
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been notoriously difficult to evaluate. Previous metrics overemphasize the importance of either detection or association. To address this, we present a novel MOT evaluation metric, HOTA (Higher Order Tracking Accuracy), which explicitly balances the effect of performing accurate detection, association and localization into a single unified metric for comparing trackers. HOTA decomposes into a family of sub-metrics which are able to evaluate each of five basic error types separately, which enables clear analysis of tracking performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of HOTA on the MOTChallenge benchmark, and show that it is able to capture important aspects of MOT performance not previously taken into account by established metrics. Furthermore, we show HOTA scores better align with human visual evaluation of tracking performance.