Reinforcement Learning-Based Sequence Training for Robust Vehicle Tracking in Dynamic Traffic Scenes

Vehicle tracking is essential for autonomous driving, traffic surveillance, and intelligent transportation, yet most existing trackers rely on frame-level training that neglects temporal dependencies. This mismatch between training and testing leads to error propagation, mislocalization in challenging frames, and failure to re-identify vehicles after occlusion. We present a reinforcement learning (RL)-based sequence-level training framework that formulates tracking as a sequential decision process and directly incorporates evaluation metrics consistent with testing. Our approach enhances robustness in difficult frames and occlusion scenarios by leveraging temporal decision dependencies, and introduces a temporal data augmentation strategy based on sliding-window sampling to improve generalization across diverse motion patterns. Experiments on challenging benchmarks indicate that our method provides improved robustness and temporal continuity over frame-level training approaches, suggesting the benefits of incorporating sequence-level learning in vehicle tracking.

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Publication Details

Journal
Applied Sciences
Published
2025-12-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010026
Primary Topic
Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
Type
article
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article

Reinforcement Learning-Based Sequence Training for Robust Vehicle Tracking in Dynamic Traffic Scenes

Yang Zhao, Lili Pei
Applied Sciences
Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
article

Reinforcement Learning-Based Sequence Training for Robust Vehicle Tracking in Dynamic Traffic Scenes

Yang Zhao, Lili Pei
article en

Abstract

Vehicle tracking is essential for autonomous driving, traffic surveillance, and intelligent transportation, yet most existing trackers rely on frame-level training that neglects temporal dependencies. This mismatch between training and testing leads to error propagation, mislocalization in challenging frames, and failure to re-identify vehicles after occlusion. We present a reinforcement learning (RL)-based sequence-level training framework that formulates tracking as a sequential decision process and directly incorporates evaluation metrics consistent with testing. Our approach enhances robustness in difficult frames and occlusion scenarios by leveraging temporal decision dependencies, and introduces a temporal data augmentation strategy based on sliding-window sampling to improve generalization across diverse motion patterns. Experiments on challenging benchmarks indicate that our method provides improved robustness and temporal continuity over frame-level training approaches, suggesting the benefits of incorporating sequence-level learning in vehicle tracking.

Applied SciencesVol. 16(1)
Changzhi University (CN), Chang'an University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 57%
Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
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