Mind · Inference
ConfidenceCascadeTracking#1973
Match confident detections first, consult appearance only on ties, and let weak detections fill gaps, to keep identities unbroken
Mechanism
Multi-object tracking for interaction analysis, where every lost or swapped identity breaks a chain in a SecondOrderInteractionNetwork. Each track holds a Kalman state (x, y, s, r, dx, dy, ds): box centre, area, aspect ratio and velocities, with a constant-velocity model, large initial velocity uncertainty (1e4) and small process noise. Each frame: (1) match high-confidence detections (score > 0.7) to all active tracks by IoU distance 1 - IoU with the Hungarian algorithm; (2) when best and second-best IoU candidates are too close, use a re-identification network (ResNet-50 fine-tuned with triplet loss, cosine distance on embeddings) as a tie-breaker; (3) match remaining low-confidence detections (0.1-0.7) only to tracks still unassigned, rejecting matches above a distance threshold; treat scores below 0.1 as background. Unmatched tracks keep their last position (no Kalman drift) and are deleted after 60 frames (1 s), which bridges brief occlusions. Export per-frame centroids and keypoints per track.
Invariants
- Low-confidence detections can never displace a track already matched by a high-confidence one
- Appearance is consulted only when geometry is ambiguous
- A track survives a bounded number of unmatched frames, then is deleted
Failure modes
- Dense clusters (aggression) still produce identity swaps that need manual or rule-based repair downstream
- A re-ID model trained on few individuals from one viewpoint generalises poorly to new animals or lighting
- Holding position during occlusion mislocates fast movers when they reappear
Where this came from
- Thesis Kevin Do, PhD thesis on ant collective behaviour (NCSU, 2026), Ch. 2.2.4-2.2.5, Eqs. 2.6-2.8; deepSORT/ByteTrack adaptation
Builds on
Identity
The name is the hash of the definition. Change a word and it becomes a different pattern.
- Sema ID
sema:ConfidenceCascadeTracking#mh:SHA-256:19736fba4c132b16ae36577b7d58b119b1437c16b1ceacb61a484c428fea01a3- Reference
ConfidenceCascadeTracking#1973- Ring
- 2
- Tier
- 1