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
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.
arXiv:2606. 14094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information.
By Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Chao Wang, Yitao Li, Menghao Liu, Bo Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang
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
arXiv:2607. 17157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to localize multiple objects in videos while preserving their identities over time.
By Yanrong Qin, Xiaoyan Cao, Yao Yao
ESMTrack is a fully end‑to‑end self‑supervised RGB‑T tracking framework that eliminates the need for costly modality‑aligned bounding boxes or offline pseudo‑label generation. It learns discriminative, temporally consistent representations using a grounding triplet loss on the initial annotated frame and a cross‑frame temporal triplet loss on unlabeled search frames, with reliable samples selected via forward‑backward consistency. A three‑branch architecture (fusion, RGB, thermal) and a modality decoupling mechanism mitigate modality dominance bias, enabling competitive state‑of‑the‑art performance, strong cross‑dataset generalization, and real‑time inference on five RGB‑T benchmarks.
By Shenglan Li, Rui Yao, Kunyang Sun, Hong Jia, Yong Zhou, Javen Qinfeng Shi, Xinyu Zhang