  With the recent advances in the object detection research field,
tracking-by-detection has become the leading paradigm adopted by multi-object
tracking algorithms. By extracting different features from detected objects,
those algorithms can estimate the objects' similarities and association
patterns along successive frames. However, since similarity functions applied
by tracking algorithms are handcrafted, it is difficult to employ them in new
contexts. In this study, it is investigated the use of artificial neural
networks to learning a similarity function that can be used among detections.
During training, the networks were introduced to correct and incorrect
association patterns, sampled from a pedestrian tracking data set. For such,
different motion and appearance features combinations have been explored.
Finally, a trained network has been inserted into a multiple-object tracking
framework, which has been assessed on the MOT Challenge benchmark. Throughout
the experiments, the proposed tracker matched the results obtained by
state-of-the-art methods, it has run 58\% faster than a recent and similar
method, used as baseline.
