  Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes
into entities without additional localization information and are excellent
candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT)
pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split
into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact,
state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency
by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the
association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for
MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots
into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object
prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we
only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and
feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised
Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach
requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the
existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and
outperform several unsupervised trackers.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition