Does the quality of the video matters using Deep Sort and Yolo v3?

Question

I'm using Deep Sort and Yolo to code an object tracker. Everything works fine, objects are detected and tracked by the algorithm. This app has to count vehicule passing through a crossroad.

But I noticed different results by detecting objects on 720p and 480p videos. Indeed, the tracker seems to better work on the 720p video, almost all vehicules are tracked and keep the same id during the process. But with 480p video, it's not that accurate. IDs of vehicule are often changing so the counting process cannot be ok at the end.

So I'm wondering if the video quality has a real impact on deep sort and if it does how can I modify parameters of Deep Sort like iou_distance or matching_threshold to have better result in a 480p video ?

Answer 1

So I'm wondering if the video quality has a real impact on deep sort

Your object detection model inputs observations to deep sort. The better your object detection model, the easier it will be for DeepSort to track. Higher img resolution usually gives better detections, specially if there are small objects with respect to the total field of view of the camera. This is because you would loose details that could make certain object more easily identifiable with lower resolutions.

and if it does how can I modify parameters of Deep Sort like iou_distance or matching_threshold to have better result in a 480p video?

As the answer to the previous question is yes, I will continue answering to the rest of the question. If your object detection is alright you can start by lowering

MAX_DIST: 0.2 # The matching threshold. Samples with larger distance are considered an invalid match

so that you minimize the ID switches