UGO: Unified Architecture for General Multi-Object Tracking by Segmentation
Organizations: Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana
Abstract
General multi-object tracking (GMOT) tracks all instances of a user-specified category from a single first-frame exemplar. Prior work relies on bounding boxes and surrogate training, and struggles with non-rigid objects, crowded scenes, and distractors. We introduce UGO, a unified GMOT tracker that pairs a pretrained exemplar-conditioned detection head with an instance-propagation head in a common architecture. A novel training-free, energy-minimization consolidation method converts overlapping proposals into exclusive pixel-wise masks and detections, resolving over-segmentation, duplicates, and conflicts. A hierarchical memory spanning global and instance levels improves recall and per-instance segmentation accuracy using a new memory management protocol. UGO sets a new state-of-the-art on GMOT benchmarks and video object counting, and is competitive with specialist MOT methods, establishing a strong paradigm for unified, open-category multi-object tracking.
Figures & tables
| Detector | Tracker | IDF1 | MT | ML | FP | FN | F1 | IDSw | MOTA | HOTA | |
| Open-Vocabulary | OVTrack [ 21 ] | DeepSORT [ 38 ] | 21.2 | 165 | 1367 | 49984 | 160378 | 47.7 | 1470 | 20.2 | - |
| ByteTrack [ 44 ] | 20.6 | 164 | 1345 | 51356 | 156329 | 49.1 | 1669 | 19.9 | - | ||
| BoT-SORT [ 1 ] | 20.3 | 167 | 1328 | 45721 | 163378 | 47.1 | 3278 | 20.0 | - | ||
| TbQ [ 23 ] -SwT | 18.7 | 186 | 1304 | 50784 | 154893 | 49.7 | 6381 | 21.3 | - | ||
| GLIP-T [ 20 ] | DeepSORT [ 38 ] | 41.6 | 401 | 877 | 46610 | 141330 | 55.0 | 2892 | 25.5 | - | |
| ByteTrack [ 44 ] | 45.1 | 447 | 746 | 52591 | 131759 | 57.5 | 2706 | 27.0 | - |
| Method | HOTA | MOTA | IDF1 | IDP | IDR | MT | PT | ML | F1 | IDSw | FM |
| ByteTrack [ 44 ] | 40.1 | 38.5 | 51.2 | 64.9 | 42.3 | 310 | 465 | 329 | 0.631 | 1309 | 3513 |
| IOUTrack [ 6 ] | 41.6 | 55.7 | 45.7 | 51.9 | 40.7 | 388 | 454 | 262 | 0.762 | 4639 | 5259 |
| SORT [ 5 ] | 42.8 | 55.6 | 49.2 | 58.5 | 42.4 | 333 | 470 | 301 | 0.749 | 2530 | 3730 |
| OMC [ 22 ] | 43.0 | 53.4 | 50.3 | 61.8 | 42.4 | 324 | 478 | 302 | 0.735 | 4938 | 7162 |
| Tracktor++ [ 4 ] | 44.2 | 55.2 | 51.0 | 58.5 | 45.1 | 364 | 472 | 268 | 0.751 | 1976 | 4149 |
| TransTrack [ 35 ] | 45.4 | 48.3 | 53.4 | 63.4 | 46.1 | 327 | 416 | 361 | 0.705 | 1978 | 6459 |
| Method | HOTA | DetA | AssA |
| MPNTrack17 | 46.6 (7%) | 46.2 (-2%) | 47.3 (18%) |
| eTC17 | 45.1 (11%) | 44.1 (3%) | 46.4 (19%) |
| Tracktor++v2 | 45.1 (11%) | 45.3 (0%) | 45.0 (24%) |
| ByteTrack [ 44 ] | 63.1 (-21%) | 64.5 (-30%) | 62.0 (-10%) |
| OC-Sort [ 8 ] | 63.2 (-21%) | 63.2 (-28%) | 63.4 (-12%) |
| OC-Sort ∗ [ 8 ] | 54.6 (-8%) | 47.8 (-5%) | 57.6 (-3%) |
| Method | HOTA | DetA | AssA |
| MPNTrack17 | 46.6 (7%) | 46.2 (-2%) | 47.3 (18%) |
| eTC17 | 45.1 (11%) | 44.1 (3%) | 46.4 (19%) |
| Tracktor++v2 | 45.1 (11%) | 45.3 (0%) | 45.0 (24%) |
| ByteTrack [ 44 ] | 63.1 (-21%) | 64.5 (-30%) | 62.0 (-10%) |
| OC-Sort [ 8 ] | 63.2 (-21%) | 63.2 (-28%) | 63.4 (-12%) |
| OC-Sort ∗ [ 8 ] | 54.6 (-8%) | 47.8 (-5%) | 57.6 (-3%) |
| Penguins | Crystals | |||
| Method | MAE↓ | RMSE↓ | MAE↓ | RMSE↓ |
| GDINO * [ 24 ] | 9.0 | 11.5 | 72.3 | 87.9 |
| CountGDB * [ 2 ] | 4.3 | 5.5 | 71.6 | 88.1 |
| CountVid [ 2 ] * | 4.0 | 5.3 | 69.1 | 86.0 |
| CountGDB [ 2 ] | 4.0 | 4.2 | 31.1 | 52.8 |
| GeCo [ 31 ] | 11.3 | 14.5 | 46.1 | 82.8 |
| Method | HOTA | DetA | AssA | MOTA | FN | FP | IDSw | MT | PT | ML | FM | IDF1 |
| UGO | 50.98 | 49.11 | 54.36 | 43.12 | 61835 | 59794 | 24173 | 1084 | 671 | 189 | 8414 | 61.47 |
| UGO HM | 52.35 | 39.42 | 70.55 | 5.88 | 34457 | 204395 | 2402 | 1460 | 328 | 156 | 4553 | 60.76 |
| UGO | 52.39 | 55.56 | 50.48 | 57.11 | 39900 | 64272 | 5773 | 1360 | 421 | 163 | 4478 | 56.86 |
| UGO D4S | 61.00 | 53.80 | 70.49 | 57.33 | 51892 | 55349 | 2132 | 1252 | 430 | 262 | 4409 | 72.81 |
| UGO | 62.76 | 55.55 | 72.11 | 59.16 | 40059 | 63251 | 1375 | 1351 | 419 | 174 | 4633 | 75.66 |
| UGO | 63.19 | 56.23 | 72.20 | 60.30 | 41057 | 59463 | 1244 | 1331 | 434 | 179 | 4554 | 76.10 |
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | HOTA | MOTA | IDF1 | IDP | IDR | MT | PT | ML | FP | FN | Pr | Re | F1 | IDSw | FM |
| JDE | 26.8 | 27.3 | 31.0 | 51.0 | 22.0 | 106 | 414 | 584 | 17887 | 155623 | 0.830 | 0.360 | 0.502 | 3187 | 5031 |
| FairMOT | 30.6 | 29.0 | 38.8 | 62.8 | 28.0 | 143 | 462 | 499 | 17653 | 152624 | 0.837 | 0.372 | 0.515 | 2335 | 5447 |
| Trackformer | 31.0 | 20.4 | 36.5 | 40.9 | 32.8 | 230 | 491 | 383 | 70404 | 118724 | 0.639 | 0.512 | 0.568 | 4355 | 3725 |
| TADAM | 32.5 | 36.5 | 37.2 | 44.4 | 32.0 | 258 | 495 | 351 | 41728 | 110048 | 0.761 | 0.547 | 0.637 | 2538 | 4469 |
| DeepSORT | 32.8 | 41.4 | 35.2 | 49.7 | 27.2 | 213 | 452 | 439 | 14131 | 124747 | 0.893 | 0.487 | 0.630 | 3503 | 4527 |
| ByteTrack | 40.1 | 38.5 | 51.2 | 64.9 | 42.3 | 310 | 465 | 329 | 31591 | 116587 | 0.800 | 0.521 | 0.631 | 1309 | 3513 |
| Parameter | Default | Role |
|---|---|---|
| assoc_iou_thresh | Loose detection-to-track IoU threshold for deciding whether a detection is new. | |
| trk_assoc_iou_thresh | Stricter IoU threshold for deciding whether a tracker masklet is matched. | |
| new_det_thresh | Minimum detector score required to spawn a new object. | |
| HIGH_CONF_THRESH | Threshold for high-confidence detector reconditioning. | |
| iou_thresh_recondition | Default IoU threshold for detector-to-tracker memory refresh. | |
| suppress_overlapping_based |
| Method | HOTA | DetA | AssA | MOTA | FN | FP | IDSw | MT | PT | ML | FM | IDF1 |
| 63.71 | 56.60 | 72.91 | 61.12 | 40195 | 58347 | 1130 | 1348 | 426 | 170 | 4494 | 76.85 | |
| 63.75 | 56.62 | 72.96 | 61.15 | 40000 | 58416 | 1165 | 1345 | 431 | 168 | 4500 | 76.92 | |
| 63.82 | 56.65 | 73.09 | 61.20 | 39769 | 58605 | 1092 | 1353 | 422 | 169 | 4463 | 77.03 | |
| 63.77 | 56.64 | 72.98 | 61.20 | 39695 | 58666 | 1107 | 1344 | 433 | 167 | 4487 | 77.00 | |
| 63.62 | 56.57 | 72.72 | 60.98 | 39996 | 58942 | 1082 | 1347 | 431 | 166 | 4492 | 76.78 | |
| 63.45 | 56.33 | 72.70 | 60.37 | 38370 | 61941 | 1269 | 1359 | 419 | 166 | 4575 | 76.49 |
| Method | Quality | Accuracy | Robustness |
| SAM2.1 | 0.649 | 0.720 | 0.887 |
| DAM4SAM | 0.694 1 | 0.727 1 | 0.944 1 |
| UGO | 0.685 2 | 0.724 2 | 0.932 2 |