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 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.
Deep learning algorithms are notorious for their high carbon footprint and computational demands that limit their deployment on edge devices and raise concerns about their long-term sustainability. Neuromorphic computing and Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to traditional Von Neumann architectures, providing energy-efficient performance, massively parallel computation, and on-chip learning capabilities. Autonomous machines represent a critical application domain where these advantages are particularly valuable. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of SNNs for real-world automotive multi-object detection and tracking. Using transfer learning with the SpikeYOLO architecture, we achieve mean Average Precision of 0.937 on the KITTI dataset and 0.771 on BDD100K MOT2020 dataset for object detection and a Higher Order Tracking Accuracy score of 0.701 (KITTI) and 0.445 (BDD100K MOT2020) for object tracking--results competitive with conventional deep learning methods. Our results demonstrate that SNNs can deliver high-performance object detection and tracking in an energy efficient manner, establishing their viability for perception in real-world autonomous systems.
The tracking-by-detection paradigm in multi-object tracking (MOT) typically relies on static appearance descriptors to complement motion estimation. However, these descriptors are frame-independent, limiting their robustness as visual cues. Since such descriptors are often obtained from computationally intensive pretrained backbones, real-time MOT systems frequently abandon appearance cues altogether and rely solely on motion prediction and geometric association. In this work, we introduce Polycepta, an object-centric appearance state estimation framework that reformulates appearance modeling as a recursive estimation problem rather than a frame-wise matching task. Polycepta constructs and continuously updates an independent appearance state for each tracked object, enabling future appearance representations to be estimated from accumulated observations. Polycepta is encouraged to learn the appearance-state construction of object-specific representations rather than memorize them through a proposed learning strategy, enabling appearance estimation for unseen classes. A key property of Polycepta is that the quality of appearance estimation improves as object states evolve during inference. While conventional appearance descriptors remain static or degrade over time, Polycepta progressively refines appearance estimates as additional observations are accumulated. Extensive experiments on KITTI, the Waymo Open Dataset, and MOT17 demonstrate consistent reductions in identity switches and improvements in tracking performance when integrated into the tracking-by-detection pipelines. Polycepta operates at 90.57 Hz and delivers state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark, achieving a MOTA of 92.27%.