Nvidia Tracker Unit

The Nvidia Tracker Unit is designed for use of tracking algorithms implemented through the Nvidia Gst-nvtracker plugin, including the Nvidia NvMultiObjectTracker tracking library.

The Nvidia Tracker Unit is specified in the Savant module configuration with the nvtracker unit:

- element: nvtracker

The element does not have any Savant-specific configuration parameters. All possible parameters must be specified under the element.properties section and will be passed directly to the Gstreamer element. You can find a complete list of possible parameters at the Gst-nvtracker properties link.

The mandatory configuration parameter for nvtracker is properties.ll-lib-file, which specifies the path to the tracking library. The configuration that uses the NvMultiObjectTracker library provided within Deepstream looks like the following:

- element: nvtracker
  properties:
    ll-lib-file: /opt/nvidia/deepstream/deepstream/lib/libnvds_nvmultiobjecttracker.so

To fine-tune the tracker, you can pass a tracking configuration file to the library using the properties.ll-config-file parameter:

- element: nvtracker
  properties:
    ll-lib-file: /opt/nvidia/deepstream/deepstream/lib/libnvds_nvmultiobjecttracker.so
    ll-config-file: ${oc.env:APP_PATH}/samples/line_crossing/config_tracker_NvDCF_perf.yml

In the example above, config_tracker_NvDCF_perf.yml specifies a configuration file for one of the tracking presets provided by Nvidia. This and other configuration files can be found in the DeepStream development image at /opt/nvidia/deepstream/deepstream-6.2/samples/configs/deepstream-app. Nvidia provides four different approaches to tracking, which are described in detail in the Gst-nvtracker Tracker library documentation.

The IOU tracker is the most lightweight, but suitable only for the simplest scenes. The configuration file is config_tracker_IOU.yml.

NvSORT is also also a high performance with improved association due to the use of the Kalman filter. The configuration file is config_tracker_NvSORT.yml.

NvDeepSORT is a visual tracker that uses a GPU-based ReID model to improve association in a complex environment. The configuration file is config_tracker_NvDeepSORT.yml.

NvDCF is a flexible tracker based on discriminative correlation filter, which also can use ReID. Three configuration presets are available:

  • config_tracker_NvDCF_accuracy.yml;

  • config_tracker_NvDCF_perf.yml;

  • config_tracker_NvDCF_max_perf.yml.

More information about parameters of Nvidia’s object tracking library can be found in NvMultiObjectTracker documentation.

As an alternative to Nvidia’s trackers, it is possible to implement custom object tracking, which is described in more detail in advanced topics.