This work presents a discriminative training method for
particle filters in the context of multi-object tracking. We
are motivated by the difficulty of hand-tuning the many
model parameters for such applications and also by results
in many application domains indicating that discriminative
training is often superior to generative training methods.
Our learning approach is tightly integrated into the actual
inference process of the filter and attempts to directly optimize
the filter parameters in response to observed errors.
We present experimental results in the challenging domain
of American football where our filter is trained to track all
22 players throughout football plays. The training method
is shown to significantly improve performance of the tracker
and to significantly outperform two recent particle-based
multi-object tracking methods.