This paper conducts a systematic empirical study of multi‑object tracking (MOT) algorithms, focusing on how detection and association components affect overall performance. By evaluating state‑of‑the‑art methods on benchmarks such as MOT16/17/20, SportsMOT, DanceTrack, and CrowdTrack, the authors find that detection quality has a far greater impact than association strategies, and that transformer‑based end‑to‑end models are more robust to detection variations but computationally expensive. The study provides a unified pipeline diagram and practical guidance for researchers and practitioners in selecting and designing MOT systems.
By Linh Van Ma, Juhua Hu, Wei Cheng, Unse Fatima, Moongu Jeon
MAETrack introduces a lightweight framework to adapt pretrained masked autoencoder (MAE) representations for 3D single object tracking (SOT). It uses Layer‑Selective Initialization (LSI) to keep shallow geometric layers from the pre‑training while re‑initializing deeper layers, and Geometric Residual Gating (GRG) to emphasize salient regions in BEV features before template‑search fusion. Experiments on standard 3D SOT benchmarks show consistent improvements over vanilla fine‑tuning with minimal computational cost.
By Sifan Zhou, Qiwei Wang, Linyue Tan, Ziyu Liu, Ziyu Zhao, Xiaobo Lu
The paper investigates how detector architecture, model scale, scene density, and inference regime influence multi‑pedestrian tracking performance. It compares YOLO11, RT‑DETR, and YOLO26 detectors with ByteTrack and BoT‑SORT trackers on MOT17, MOT20, and SOMPT22 datasets, finding RT‑DETR best on HOTA but at higher cost, while YOLO26‑L with NMS balances quality and speed. End‑to‑end inference for YOLO26 did not consistently improve tracking over NMS.
By Pedro Manoel Herminio Alves, Dalton C\'ezane Gomes Valadares, Cl\'audio de Souza Baptista
ByteTraX is a lightweight enhancement to the ByteTrack multi‑object tracking architecture that introduces a single unified matching threshold and stricter track initiation criteria to reduce erroneous track reclassification and identity switches. The method yields consistent performance gains across several benchmarks—GMOT‑40, LC‑MOT, SportsMOT, TeamTrack, DAMUNT, and DeepSea‑MOT—while boosting processing speed by over 10%. Quantitatively, ByteTraX achieves more than a 40% drop in identity switches, with mean improvements of 3.6 in HOTA, 5.6 in IDF1, and 6.3 FPS.
By Thomas A. O'Shea-Wheller
UniMergeTrack introduces a hierarchical model merging strategy for RGB-X visual object tracking, combining independently trained modality-specific trackers into a unified framework. The method merges transferable backbones using high‑pass‑filtered merging, aligns tracking heads with optimal transport‑guided channel alignment, and fine‑tunes with distribution alignment to integrate cross‑task knowledge while preserving modality cues. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art or competitive performance across RGB‑Thermal, RGB‑Event, and RGB‑Depth tracking tasks, with strong generalization to unseen datasets.
By Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Yuhe Ding, Jiarui Xu, Zikang Yan, Bo Jiang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang
arXiv:2610.10391v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: End-to-end multi-object trackers have narrowed the gap with classical tracking-by-detection on association-difficult benchmarks. Yet they still make sp...
By Beno\^it Roussel, Damien Bouet, Liming Chen, Pierre Perrault
arXiv:2603. 24016v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has traditionally focused on a few specific categories, restricting its applicability to real-world scenarios involving diverse objects.
By Zekun Qian, Wei Feng, Ruize Han, Junhui Hou
arXiv:2509.17323v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Visual Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of robotic perception, yet existing Tracking-By-Detection (TBD) methods often rely on 2D...
By Buyin Deng, Lingxin Huang, Kai Luo, Fei Teng, Kailun Yang
arXiv:2606. 23604v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The tracking-by-detection paradigm in multi-object tracking (MOT) typically relies on static appearance descriptors to complement motion estimation.
By Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Jorge Dias, Majid Khonji
Tetris is a video object tracking system that uses tile-level sampling to efficiently extract high‑fidelity tracks. It partitions videos into tile‑based polyominoes, classifies relevant tiles, prunes redundant ones with an ILP under a user‑defined accuracy constraint, and packs the remaining polyominoes to minimize detector calls. On seven stationary‑video datasets, Tetris maintains less than a 5% loss in tracking accuracy while achieving up to 17.4× higher throughput than prior systems and up to 68.8× higher than a full‑frame reference pipeline.
By Chanwut Kittivorawong, Alena Chao, Charlie Si, Alvin Cheung
VastMAT is a large‑scale multi‑animal tracking benchmark featuring 2,947 videos, 337 animal categories, and over 3.6 million bounding boxes with 22,883 identity trajectories. It emphasizes high‑quality, expert‑reviewed annotations and introduces Seen‑category and Unseen‑category evaluation protocols, revealing significant challenges in tracking unseen animals. The authors also propose a lightweight Center‑Distance‑Augmented Association module that boosts HOTA scores for existing MOT methods without extra training.
The paper introduces TSDA-Track, a Template-Search Domain Adaptation framework designed to reduce modality gaps in cross‑modal visual object tracking. Two variants are explored: Pre‑AFA TSDA‑Track uses adversarial alignment before transformer interaction, while Enc‑CFA TSDA‑Track applies contrastive alignment after interaction to strengthen cross‑modal correspondence. Experiments on datasets such as LasHeR, RGBT234, GTOT, and Anti‑UAV‑024 show that both variants outperform state‑of‑the‑art trackers, with Pre‑AFA achieving an SR/PR of 43.2/56.0 on RGBT234 under the modality‑switch protocol.
By Fereshteh Aghaee Meibodi, Amir Mehdi Soufi Enayati, Shadi Alijani, Homayoun Najjaran