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To deal with these problems, this work proposes a four-stage hierarchical association framework for multiple object tracking in airborne video. The proposed framework combines Data Association-based Tracking (DAT) methods and target tracking using a compressive tracking approach, to robustly track objects in complex airborne surveillance scenes. In each association stage, different sets of tracklets and detections are associated to efficiently handle local tracklet generation, local trajectory construction, global drifting tracklet correction and global fragmented tracklet linking. Experiments with challenging airborne videos show significant tracking improvement compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs10091347","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,8,24]],"date-time":"2018-08-24T03:42:31Z","timestamp":1535082151000},"page":"1347","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["A Hierarchical Association Framework for Multi-Object Tracking in Airborne Videos"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0299-6529","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ting","family":"Chen","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department Electronics and Informatics, AVSP Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 1050 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\u2019an 710072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Andrea","family":"Pennisi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department Electronics and Informatics, AVSP Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 1050 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Interuniversity Microelectronics Center, 3001 Leuven, Belgium"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6380-8996","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhi","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\u2019an 710072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yanning","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\u2019an 710072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Hichem","family":"Sahli","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department Electronics and Informatics, AVSP Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 1050 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\u2019an 710072, China"},{"name":"Interuniversity Microelectronics Center, 3001 Leuven, Belgium"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,8,23]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wan, M., Gu, G., Qian, W., Ren, K., Chen, Q., Zhang, H., and Maldague, X. 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