Dual-Linear Attention Network for Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

Multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) is a critical task in video analysis with applications spanning autonomous driving, robot navigation, and scene understanding. MOTS has made significant progress but still faces persistent challenges, such as crowded scenes, abnormal illumination, and small objects. Several trackers have implemented attention mechanisms to overcome these difficulties. However, many attention mechanisms have quadratic computational complexity and use little spatio-temporal information. This paper proposes a Dual-Linear Attention Network (DLAN), a novel approach that effectively integrates both appearance and spatio-temporal information while maintaining linear attention complexity. DLAN employs recursive linear self-attention to strengthen the appearance representation and prototypical linear cross-attention to condense rich spatio-temporal information, which can compensate for missing pixel information. DLAN optimizes both image features and segmentation, with the refined segmentation guiding frame-level memory updates to improve instance consistency. Extensive experiments on BDD100K MOT, BDD100K MOTS, and KITTI MOTS datasets demonstrate the following: (1) The three main challenges of object occlusion, illumination variation, and distant objects have been successfully mitigated by integrating DLAN. (2) DLAN has achieved an overall competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with a 26% reduction in identity switches (IDS) when compared to QDTrack-mots-fix.