Motion Estimation for Multi-Object Tracking using KalmanNet with Semantic-Independent Encoding
To address the degraded estimation performance of linear constant-velocity Kalman filtering in multi-object tracking—caused by model mismatch and non-stationary motion—this paper proposes a learning-enhanced Semantic-Independent Kalman Filter (SIC-KF). Our core innovation is a lightweight semantic-independent encoder comprising 1D convolutions (kernel size 1), fully connected layers, and nonlinear activation modules, which jointly learns decoupled representations of homogeneous semantic features and captures nonlinear dependencies among heterogeneous elements, thereby enhancing motion-awareness of the state vector. SIC-KF is seamlessly embedded into the KalmanNet framework to enable end-to-end differentiable training. Experiments on a large-scale, semi-synthetic dataset constructed by us demonstrate that SIC-KF significantly outperforms conventional Kalman filters and state-of-the-art learning-based filters, achieving new SOTA performance in both trajectory prediction accuracy and robustness to motion abruptness.