  Data association problems are an important component of many computer vision
applications, with multi-object tracking being one of the most prominent
examples. A typical approach to data association involves finding a graph
matching or network flow that minimizes a sum of pairwise association costs,
which are often either hand-crafted or learned as linear functions of fixed
features. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn features
for network-flow-based data association via backpropagation, by expressing the
optimum of a smoothed network flow problem as a differentiable function of the
pairwise association costs. We apply this approach to multi-object tracking
with a network flow formulation. Our experiments demonstrate that we are able
to successfully learn all cost functions for the association problem in an
end-to-end fashion, which outperform hand-crafted costs in all settings. The
integration and combination of various sources of inputs becomes easy and the
cost functions can be learned entirely from data, alleviating tedious
hand-designing of costs.
