Demographic-Aware Multi-Object Tracking for Retail Environments via Temporal Consistency and Joint Association

Reliable identity preservation is essential in retail multi-object tracking because an identity switch may assign dwell time, shelf interactions, or demographic statistics to the wrong consumer trajectory. This challenge is amplified in crowded indoor scenes, where occlusions and appearance ambiguity weaken conventional association cues. This work presents a demographic-aware multi-object tracking framework for retail environments that exploits spatial, motion-based, appearance-based, and demographic cues within a modular tracking-by-detection pipeline. The proposed approach integrates IoU-based spatial association, LSTM-based motion forecasting, ReID appearance embeddings, and apparent demographic information derived from age-group and gender predictions into a common association cost. The core assumption is that demographic attributes should remain consistent across neighboring frames for the same tracked individual; therefore, demographic agreement can serve as a weak semantic cue during detection-to-tracklet association. Unlike conventional pipelines that treat multi-object tracking and demographic estimation as independent stages, the proposed method reuses the outputs of an existing Inception-based apparent demographic classifier to support identity preservation, without introducing a new demographic estimation model or requiring end-to-end retraining. The framework is evaluated on RGB retail tracking sequences from the Consumers dataset under both raw and privacy-aware anonymized settings. The proposed method achieves 84.8% MOTA and 87.8% IDF1 on raw data and 80.0% MOTA and 85.3% IDF1 under anonymization, improving the strongest evaluated baseline by 0.4 and 0.6 percentage points and by 1.0 and 1.3 percentage points, respectively, while preserving the same low ID-switch counts. Although incremental in absolute terms, these gains are consistent across both evaluation settings and are obtained over a strong baseline in challenging indoor retail sequences. The results indicate that even a lightweight demographic-consistency cue can provide measurable complementary information for improving consumer trajectory stability.