Organizations: Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Abstract
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is critical in numerous real-world applications, including surveillance, autonomous driving, and robotics. Accurately predicting object motion is fundamental to MOT, but current methods struggle with the complexities of real-world, non-linear motion (e.g., sudden stops, sharp turns). While recent research has gravitated towards increasingly complex and computationally expensive generative models to tackle this problem, their practical utility is often constrained. This paper challenges that paradigm, arguing that such complexity is not only unnecessary but can be outperformed by a more efficient, purpose-built approach. We introduce the Temporal Convolutional Motion Predictor (TCMP), a novel framework for MOT that leverages a modified Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) featuring dilated convolutions and a regression head. This design allows for effective motion prediction across arbitrary temporal context lengths. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, specifically improves upon the previous best method in several key metrics: HOTA (a measure of overall tracking accuracy) increases from 62.3% to 63.4%, IDF1 (a measure of identity preservation) rises from 63.0% to 65.0%, and AssA (a measure of association accuracy) improves from 47.2% to 49.1%. Significantly, TCMP achieves this performance while being highly efficient; it has only 0.014 times the parameters and requires only 0.05 times the computational cost (FLOPs) compared to the SOTA method. while is only 0.014 times the size (in terms of parameters) and requires only 0.05 times the computational cost (in terms of FLOPs). These findings highlight the robustness of our method to advance MOT systems by ensuring adaptability, accuracy, and efficiency in complex tracking environments.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental task in computer vision that requires continuously tracking multiple targets while maintaining consistent identities across frames. However, most existing approaches primarily rely on instance-level object features for trajectory association, which often leads to degraded performance under challenging conditions such as object deformation, nonlinear motion, and occlusion. In this work, we propose SAMOFT, a robust tracker that leverages pixel-level cues to improve robustness under complex motion scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a Pixel Motion Matching (PMM) module that integrates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with dense optical flow to refine Kalman filter-based motion prediction using instantaneous foreground pixel motion. To further enhance robustness under unreliable detections, we design a Centroid Distance Matching (CDM) module that performs flexible mask-based centroid matching for low-confidence or partially occluded observations. Moreover, a Distribution-Based Correction (DBC) module models long-tailed motion patterns in a training-free manner using historical optical flow statistics and dynamically corrects trajectory states online. We also incorporate a Cluster-Aware ReID (CA-ReID) strategy to improve the stability and discriminative power of trajectory appearance features. Extensive experiments on the DanceTrack and MOTChallenge benchmarks demonstrate that SAMOFT consistently improves baseline trackers and achieves competitive performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of leveraging pixel-level cues for robust multi-object tracking.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a fundamental role in visual perception, where accurate trajectory prediction is essential for reliable target association under complex motion patterns. Recent trackers have improved motion modeling with densely activated artificial neural networks, yet they largely overlook whether such dense responses are necessary for trajectory prediction. In this paper, we formulate activation sparsity preference (ASP) by tackling two key questions: 1. How can we identify a model architecture that appropriately and formally explains ASP, and 2. How can we translate this explanation into competitive tracking performance. Theoretical analysis shows that sparse gating is no worse than state-independent dropout under the same activation rate. Based on this insight, SpikingMOT is proposed as a spike-driven tracker that adaptively models sparse trajectory dynamics with spiking neural networks (SNNs). Specifically, SpikingMOT decomposes each trajectory state into pseudo-trajectory bases and uses the current prediction error to calibrate the posterior for next-frame prediction. With this brain-inspired loop, SpikingMOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in extensive experiments, 74.9 HOTA on SportsMOT and 56.5 HOTA on DanceTrack, while reducing the parameters and energy by 72% and 86.7%, respectively. These results bring SNNs into MOT, opening a promising direction for efficient tracking.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is an essential computer vision task that simultaneously tracks multiple objects in video sequences, with various applications in surveillance, autonomous navigation, and human-computer interaction. The tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, which combines object detection with temporal association, has emerged as a leading approach, driven by innovative algorithms. Despite recent progress, fair evaluation of TBD-based methods remains a challenge. Many studies introduce modules such as similarity metrics, data association strategies, or motion models, but they are often evaluated under inconsistent protocols, with different baseline trackers, hyperparameters, and datasets. Such inconsistencies obscure the genuine contribution of each module and hinder objective comparison. This survey systematically reviews TBD-based MOT techniques, including similarity measurements, data association, camera motion compensation, and interpolation strategies. Starting from a minimal baseline tracker, we fairly evaluate the contributions of each method across diverse datasets and accumulate well-balanced methods. Our findings establish a strong baseline tracker and provide a foundation for the principled design of robust and versatile MOT systems suitable for real-world deployment.