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Sep 8

MaskPro: Linear-Space Probabilistic Learning for Strict (N:M)-Sparsity on LLMs

The rapid scaling of large language models~(LLMs) has made inference efficiency a primary bottleneck in the practical deployment. To address this, semi-structured sparsity offers a promising solution by strategically retaining N elements out of every M weights, thereby enabling hardware-friendly acceleration and reduced memory. However, existing (N:M)-compatible approaches typically fall into two categories: rule-based layerwise greedy search, which suffers from considerable errors, and gradient-driven combinatorial learning, which incurs prohibitive training costs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel linear-space probabilistic framework named MaskPro, which aims to learn a prior categorical distribution for every M consecutive weights and subsequently leverages this distribution to generate the (N:M)-sparsity throughout an N-way sampling without replacement. Furthermore, to mitigate the training instability induced by the high variance of policy gradients in the super large combinatorial space, we propose a novel update method by introducing a moving average tracker of loss residuals instead of vanilla loss. Finally, we conduct comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to validate the superior performance of MaskPro, as well as its excellent scalability in memory efficiency and exceptional robustness to data samples. Our code is available at https://github.com/woodenchild95/Maskpro.git{\ttfamily https://github.com/woodenchild95/Maskpro.git}.

  • 6 authors
·
May 12

MambaTrack: A Simple Baseline for Multiple Object Tracking with State Space Model

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 17, 2024

StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again

Recently, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has attracted rising attention, and accordingly, remarkable progresses have been achieved. However, the existing methods tend to use various basic models (e.g, detector and embedding model), and different training or inference tricks, etc. As a result, the construction of a good baseline for a fair comparison is essential. In this paper, a classic tracker, i.e., DeepSORT, is first revisited, and then is significantly improved from multiple perspectives such as object detection, feature embedding, and trajectory association. The proposed tracker, named StrongSORT, contributes a strong and fair baseline for the MOT community. Moreover, two lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms are proposed to address two inherent "missing" problems of MOT: missing association and missing detection. Specifically, unlike most methods, which associate short tracklets into complete trajectories at high computation complexity, we propose an appearance-free link model (AFLink) to perform global association without appearance information, and achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation (GSI) based on Gaussian process regression to relieve the missing detection. AFLink and GSI can be easily plugged into various trackers with a negligible extra computational cost (1.7 ms and 7.1 ms per image, respectively, on MOT17). Finally, by fusing StrongSORT with AFLink and GSI, the final tracker (StrongSORT++) achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack and KITTI. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/StrongSORT and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmtracking.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27, 2022

CAMELTrack: Context-Aware Multi-cue ExpLoitation for Online Multi-Object Tracking

Online multi-object tracking has been recently dominated by tracking-by-detection (TbD) methods, where recent advances rely on increasingly sophisticated heuristics for tracklet representation, feature fusion, and multi-stage matching. The key strength of TbD lies in its modular design, enabling the integration of specialized off-the-shelf models like motion predictors and re-identification. However, the extensive usage of human-crafted rules for temporal associations makes these methods inherently limited in their ability to capture the complex interplay between various tracking cues. In this work, we introduce CAMEL, a novel association module for Context-Aware Multi-Cue ExpLoitation, that learns resilient association strategies directly from data, breaking free from hand-crafted heuristics while maintaining TbD's valuable modularity. At its core, CAMEL employs two transformer-based modules and relies on a novel association-centric training scheme to effectively model the complex interactions between tracked targets and their various association cues. Unlike end-to-end detection-by-tracking approaches, our method remains lightweight and fast to train while being able to leverage external off-the-shelf models. Our proposed online tracking pipeline, CAMELTrack, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tracking benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/TrackingLaboratory/CAMELTrack.

  • 5 authors
·
May 2, 2025

Pixels or Positions? Benchmarking Modalities in Group Activity Recognition

Group Activity Recognition (GAR) is well studied on the video modality for surveillance and indoor team sports (e.g., volleyball, basketball). Yet, other modalities such as agent positions and trajectories over time, i.e. tracking, remain comparatively under-explored despite being compact, agent-centric signals that explicitly encode spatial interactions. Understanding whether pixel (video) or position (tracking) modalities leads to better group activity recognition is therefore important to drive further research on the topic. However, no standardized benchmark currently exists that aligns broadcast video and tracking data for the same group activities, leading to a lack of apples-to-apples comparison between these modalities for GAR. In this work, we introduce SoccerNet-GAR, a multimodal dataset built from the 64 matches of the football World Cup 2022. Specifically, the broadcast videos and player tracking modalities for 94{,}285 group activities are synchronized and annotated with 10 categories. Furthermore, we define a unified evaluation protocol to benchmark two strong unimodal approaches: (i) a competitive video-based classifiers and (ii) a tracking-based classifiers leveraging graph neural networks. In particular, our novel role-aware graph architecture for tracking-based GAR directly encodes tactical structure through positional edges and temporal attention. Our tracking model achieves 67.2% balanced accuracy compared to 58.1% for the best video baseline, while training 4.25 times faster with 438 times fewer parameters (197K \vs 86.3M). This study provides new insights into the relative strengths of pixels and positions for group activity recognition. Overall, it highlights the importance of modality choice and role-aware modeling for GAR.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 16, 2025

TrackSSM: A General Motion Predictor by State-Space Model

Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S^2L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Xavier-Lin/TrackSSM.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 31, 2024

Prediction of the motion of chest internal points using a recurrent neural network trained with real-time recurrent learning for latency compensation in lung cancer radiotherapy

During the radiotherapy treatment of patients with lung cancer, the radiation delivered to healthy tissue around the tumor needs to be minimized, which is difficult because of respiratory motion and the latency of linear accelerator systems. In the proposed study, we first use the Lucas-Kanade pyramidal optical flow algorithm to perform deformable image registration of chest computed tomography scan images of four patients with lung cancer. We then track three internal points close to the lung tumor based on the previously computed deformation field and predict their position with a recurrent neural network (RNN) trained using real-time recurrent learning (RTRL) and gradient clipping. The breathing data is quite regular, sampled at approximately 2.5Hz, and includes artificial drift in the spine direction. The amplitude of the motion of the tracked points ranged from 12.0mm to 22.7mm. Finally, we propose a simple method for recovering and predicting 3D tumor images from the tracked points and the initial tumor image based on a linear correspondence model and Nadaraya-Watson non-linear regression. The root-mean-square error, maximum error, and jitter corresponding to the RNN prediction on the test set were smaller than the same performance measures obtained with linear prediction and least mean squares (LMS). In particular, the maximum prediction error associated with the RNN, equal to 1.51mm, is respectively 16.1% and 5.0% lower than the maximum error associated with linear prediction and LMS. The average prediction time per time step with RTRL is equal to 119ms, which is less than the 400ms marker position sampling time. The tumor position in the predicted images appears visually correct, which is confirmed by the high mean cross-correlation between the original and predicted images, equal to 0.955.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 13, 2022

Did We Actually Fix It? An Independent Adversarial Stress-Test of Post-Point-Adjustment Evaluation Metrics for Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Point-adjustment (PA), for years the default scoring protocol in time-series anomaly detection (TSAD), was shown by Kim et al. (2022) to award near-perfect F1 to random anomaly scores. The field adopted a suite of replacement metrics (PA%K, range-based precision/recall, affiliation precision/recall, and Volume-Under-the-Surface, VUS, ROC/PR). We ask, independently and adversarially, whether these resist no-skill detectors on real benchmarks, and find the answer turns entirely on one overlooked variable: N, the number of random attempts an adversary reports the best of. Under a single honest run (N=1), not one replacement metric is gameable on any of six benchmarks (UCR, SMD, SMAP, MSL, NAB, PSM): a random detector reaches 90% of the best real detector's score on at most 11% of series for affiliation-F1, 5% for the ROC family, and 2% for the PR-based metrics and PA%K. But under best-of-N reporting, the seed-shopping endemic to ML, the metrics split sharply. affiliation-F1 and every ROC-based metric inflate steeply, affiliation crossing gameable (25% of series) by N=3 and reaching 0.98 at the full pool (N=41), the ROC family crossing by N=9-11; the PR-based metrics and PA%K stay near-flat at every N, floored near the anomaly prevalence (the lone exception is NAB at large N). A paired test finds VUS-ROC inflated on 131 series where its sibling VUS-PR is not, and never the reverse. The ROC-vs-PR split follows from the order-statistic behaviour of AUC under extreme class imbalance (a random PR-AUC is floored at prevalence); affiliation inflates by a second route, its extreme single-run leniency (already fragile at N=1). We release a pip-installable stress-test harness, and recommend reporting single-run scores or disclosing N and preferring PR-based metrics, which resist best-of-N inflation on nearly every benchmark.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 18

EchoTracker: Advancing Myocardial Point Tracking in Echocardiography

Tissue tracking in echocardiography is challenging due to the complex cardiac motion and the inherent nature of ultrasound acquisitions. Although optical flow methods are considered state-of-the-art (SOTA), they struggle with long-range tracking, noise occlusions, and drift throughout the cardiac cycle. Recently, novel learning-based point tracking techniques have been introduced to tackle some of these issues. In this paper, we build upon these techniques and introduce EchoTracker, a two-fold coarse-to-fine model that facilitates the tracking of queried points on a tissue surface across ultrasound image sequences. The architecture contains a preliminary coarse initialization of the trajectories, followed by reinforcement iterations based on fine-grained appearance changes. It is efficient, light, and can run on mid-range GPUs. Experiments demonstrate that the model outperforms SOTA methods, with an average position accuracy of 67% and a median trajectory error of 2.86 pixels. Furthermore, we show a relative improvement of 25% when using our model to calculate the global longitudinal strain (GLS) in a clinical test-retest dataset compared to other methods. This implies that learning-based point tracking can potentially improve performance and yield a higher diagnostic and prognostic value for clinical measurements than current techniques. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/riponazad/echotracker/.

  • 8 authors
·
May 13, 2024

Monocular Quasi-Dense 3D Object Tracking

A reliable and accurate 3D tracking framework is essential for predicting future locations of surrounding objects and planning the observer's actions in numerous applications such as autonomous driving. We propose a framework that can effectively associate moving objects over time and estimate their full 3D bounding box information from a sequence of 2D images captured on a moving platform. The object association leverages quasi-dense similarity learning to identify objects in various poses and viewpoints with appearance cues only. After initial 2D association, we further utilize 3D bounding boxes depth-ordering heuristics for robust instance association and motion-based 3D trajectory prediction for re-identification of occluded vehicles. In the end, an LSTM-based object velocity learning module aggregates the long-term trajectory information for more accurate motion extrapolation. Experiments on our proposed simulation data and real-world benchmarks, including KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets, show that our tracking framework offers robust object association and tracking on urban-driving scenarios. On the Waymo Open benchmark, we establish the first camera-only baseline in the 3D tracking and 3D detection challenges. Our quasi-dense 3D tracking pipeline achieves impressive improvements on the nuScenes 3D tracking benchmark with near five times tracking accuracy of the best vision-only submission among all published methods. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/SysCV/qd-3dt.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 12, 2021

SiamGM: Siamese Geometry-Aware and Motion-Guided Network for Real-Time Satellite Video Object Tracking

Single object tracking in satellite videos is inherently challenged by small target, blurred background, large aspect ratio changes, and frequent visual occlusions. These constraints often cause appearance-based trackers to accumulate errors and lose targets irreversibly. To systematically mitigate both spatial ambiguities and temporal information loss, we propose SiamGM, a novel geometry-aware and motion-guided Siamese network. From a spatial perspective, we introduce an Inter-Frame Graph Attention (IFGA) module, closely integrated with an Aspect Ratio-Constrained Label Assignment (LA) method, establishing fine-grained topological correspondences and explicitly preventing surrounding background noise. From a temporal perspective, we introduce the Motion Vector-Guided Online Tracking Optimization method. By adopting the Normalized Peak-to-Sidelobe Ratio (nPSR) as a dynamic confidence indicator, we propose an Online Motion Model Refinement (OMMR) strategy to utilize historical trajectory information. Evaluations on two challenging SatSOT and SV248S benchmarks confirm that SiamGM outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers in both precision and success metrics. Notably, the proposed components of SiamGM introduce virtually no computational overhead, enabling real-time tracking at 130 frames per second (FPS). Codes and tracking results are available at https://github.com/wenzx18/SiamGM.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 8

LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark

Despite great recent advances in visual tracking, its further development, including both algorithm design and evaluation, is limited due to lack of dedicated large-scale benchmarks. To address this problem, we present LaSOT, a high-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking benchmark. LaSOT contains a diverse selection of 85 object classes, and offers 1,550 totaling more than 3.87 million frames. Each video frame is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box. This makes LaSOT, to our knowledge, the largest densely annotated tracking benchmark. Our goal in releasing LaSOT is to provide a dedicated high quality platform for both training and evaluation of trackers. The average video length of LaSOT is around 2,500 frames, where each video contains various challenge factors that exist in real world video footage,such as the targets disappearing and re-appearing. These longer video lengths allow for the assessment of long-term trackers. To take advantage of the close connection between visual appearance and natural language, we provide language specification for each video in LaSOT. We believe such additions will allow for future research to use linguistic features to improve tracking. Two protocols, full-overlap and one-shot, are designated for flexible assessment of trackers. We extensively evaluate 48 baseline trackers on LaSOT with in-depth analysis, and results reveal that there still exists significant room for improvement. The complete benchmark, tracking results as well as analysis are available at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~lasot/.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 7, 2020

PlanarTrack: A Large-scale Challenging Benchmark for Planar Object Tracking

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack_{BB} for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack_{BB} manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack_{BB} is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

Online Unsupervised Feature Learning for Visual Tracking

Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extract local image patches from it and each local patch is encoded with respect to the dictionary. The encoded features are then pooled over a spatial pyramid to form an aggregated feature vector. Finally, a simple linear classifier is trained on these features. Our experiments show that the proposed powerful---albeit simple---tracker, outperforms all the state-of-the-art tracking methods that we have tested. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of different dictionary learning and feature encoding methods in the proposed tracking framework, and analyse the impact of each component in the tracking scenario. We also demonstrate the flexibility of feature learning by plugging it into Hare et al.'s tracking method. The outcome is, to our knowledge, the best tracker ever reported, which facilitates the advantages of both feature learning and structured output prediction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 7, 2013

Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports

Deep learning-based object detectors have driven notable progress in multi-object tracking algorithms. Yet, current tracking methods mainly focus on simple, regular motion patterns in pedestrians or vehicles. This leaves a gap in tracking algorithms for targets with nonlinear, irregular motion, like athletes. Additionally, relying on the Kalman filter in recent tracking algorithms falls short when object motion defies its linear assumption. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel online and robust multi-object tracking approach named deep ExpansionIoU (Deep-EIoU), which focuses on multi-object tracking for sports scenarios. Unlike conventional methods, we abandon the use of the Kalman filter and leverage the iterative scale-up ExpansionIoU and deep features for robust tracking in sports scenarios. This approach achieves superior tracking performance without adopting a more robust detector, all while keeping the tracking process in an online fashion. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in tracking irregular motion objects, achieving a score of 77.2% HOTA on the SportsMOT dataset and 85.4% HOTA on the SoccerNet-Tracking dataset. It outperforms all previous state-of-the-art trackers on various large-scale multi-object tracking benchmarks, covering various kinds of sports scenarios. The code and models are available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/Deep-EIoU.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 22, 2023

NT-VOT211: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Night-time Visual Object Tracking

Many current visual object tracking benchmarks such as OTB100, NfS, UAV123, LaSOT, and GOT-10K, predominantly contain day-time scenarios while the challenges posed by the night-time has been less investigated. It is primarily because of the lack of a large-scale, well-annotated night-time benchmark for rigorously evaluating tracking algorithms. To this end, this paper presents NT-VOT211, a new benchmark tailored for evaluating visual object tracking algorithms in the challenging night-time conditions. NT-VOT211 consists of 211 diverse videos, offering 211,000 well-annotated frames with 8 attributes including camera motion, deformation, fast motion, motion blur, tiny target, distractors, occlusion and out-of-view. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest night-time tracking benchmark to-date that is specifically designed to address unique challenges such as adverse visibility, image blur, and distractors inherent to night-time tracking scenarios. Through a comprehensive analysis of results obtained from 42 diverse tracking algorithms on NT-VOT211, we uncover the strengths and limitations of these algorithms, highlighting opportunities for enhancements in visual object tracking, particularly in environments with suboptimal lighting. Besides, a leaderboard for revealing performance rankings, annotation tools, comprehensive meta-information and all the necessary code for reproducibility of results is made publicly available. We believe that our NT-VOT211 benchmark will not only be instrumental in facilitating field deployment of VOT algorithms, but will also help VOT enhancements and it will unlock new real-world tracking applications. Our dataset and other assets can be found at: {https://github.com/LiuYuML/NV-VOT211.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 26, 2024

UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions

Visual object tracking has gained promising progress in past decades. Most of the existing approaches focus on learning target representation in well-conditioned daytime data, while for the unconstrained real-world scenarios with adverse weather conditions, e.g. nighttime or foggy environment, the tremendous domain shift leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose UMDATrack, which is capable of maintaining high-quality target state prediction under various adverse weather conditions within a unified domain adaptation framework. Specifically, we first use a controllable scenario generator to synthesize a small amount of unlabeled videos (less than 2% frames in source daytime datasets) in multiple weather conditions under the guidance of different text prompts. Afterwards, we design a simple yet effective domain-customized adapter (DCA), allowing the target objects' representation to rapidly adapt to various weather conditions without redundant model updating. Furthermore, to enhance the localization consistency between source and target domains, we propose a target-aware confidence alignment module (TCA) following optimal transport theorem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMDATrack can surpass existing advanced visual trackers and lead new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/Z-Z188/UMDATrack.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025

Detection Recovery in Online Multi-Object Tracking with Sparse Graph Tracker

In existing joint detection and tracking methods, pairwise relational features are used to match previous tracklets to current detections. However, the features may not be discriminative enough for a tracker to identify a target from a large number of detections. Selecting only high-scored detections for tracking may lead to missed detections whose confidence score is low. Consequently, in the online setting, this results in disconnections of tracklets which cannot be recovered. In this regard, we present Sparse Graph Tracker (SGT), a novel online graph tracker using higher-order relational features which are more discriminative by aggregating the features of neighboring detections and their relations. SGT converts video data into a graph where detections, their connections, and the relational features of two connected nodes are represented by nodes, edges, and edge features, respectively. The strong edge features allow SGT to track targets with tracking candidates selected by top-K scored detections with large K. As a result, even low-scored detections can be tracked, and the missed detections are also recovered. The robustness of K value is shown through the extensive experiments. In the MOT16/17/20 and HiEve Challenge, SGT outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers with real-time inference speed. Especially, a large improvement in MOTA is shown in the MOT20 and HiEve Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/HYUNJS/SGT.

  • 4 authors
·
May 2, 2022

Video Individual Counting and Tracking from Moving Drones: A Benchmark and Methods

Counting and tracking dense crowds in large-scale scenes is a highly practical yet challenging problem. Existing methods mostly rely on fixed-camera datasets with limited scene coverage, making them inadequate for crowd analysis in large-scale scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce MovingDroneCrowd++, the largest video-level dataset dedicated to dense crowd counting and tracking with fast-moving drones, captured under diverse flight altitudes, camera angles, and illumination conditions. Existing methods, however, still fail to achieve satisfactory video individual counting or tracking performance under these challenging aerial conditions. To this end, we propose GD3A (Global Density map Decomposition via group-wise Descriptor Association), a video individual counting method that first establishes pixel-level correspondences between pedestrian descriptors across frames via optimal transport with an adaptive dustbin score. Then, group-wise association is adopted to guide the decomposition of the global density map into shared, inflow, and outflow density maps. We further introduce a pedestrian tracking method, DVTrack (Descriptor Voting Track), which converts descriptor-level matching into instance-level association through descriptor voting. Our methods rely on the association results of group-wise multiple descriptors for each pedestrian rather than a single vector. Since intra-group matching errors do not affect the final counting and tracking results, our methods are more robust in dense crowds and challenging aerial conditions. Experiments show that our methods achieve substantial gains in both crowd counting and tracking on moving-drone videos with dense crowds and complex motions, reducing counting error by 47.4% and improving tracking accuracy by 64.6%. Code, dataset, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/fyw1999/MovingDroneCrowd.

  • 6 authors
·
May 27

Learning Association via Track-Detection Matching for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking aims to maintain object identities over time by associating detections across video frames. Two dominant paradigms exist in literature: tracking-by-detection methods, which are computationally efficient but rely on handcrafted association heuristics, and end-to-end approaches, which learn association from data at the cost of higher computational complexity. We propose Track-Detection Link Prediction (TDLP), a tracking-by-detection method that performs per-frame association via link prediction between tracks and detections, i.e., by predicting the correct continuation of each track at every frame. TDLP is architecturally designed primarily for geometric features such as bounding boxes, while optionally incorporating additional cues, including pose and appearance. Unlike heuristic-based methods, TDLP learns association directly from data without handcrafted rules, while remaining modular and computationally efficient compared to end-to-end trackers. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TDLP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art performance across both tracking-by-detection and end-to-end methods. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis comparing link prediction with metric learning-based association and show that link prediction is more effective, particularly when handling heterogeneous features such as detection bounding boxes. Our code is available at https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP{https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP}.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 26, 2025

Taming Modern Point Tracking for Speckle Tracking Echocardiography via Impartial Motion

Accurate motion estimation for tracking deformable tissues in echocardiography is essential for precise cardiac function measurements. While traditional methods like block matching or optical flow struggle with intricate cardiac motion, modern point tracking approaches remain largely underexplored in this domain. This work investigates the potential of state-of-the-art (SOTA) point tracking methods for ultrasound, with a focus on echocardiography. Although these novel approaches demonstrate strong performance in general videos, their effectiveness and generalizability in echocardiography remain limited. By analyzing cardiac motion throughout the heart cycle in real B-mode ultrasound videos, we identify that a directional motion bias across different views is affecting the existing training strategies. To mitigate this, we refine the training procedure and incorporate a set of tailored augmentations to reduce the bias and enhance tracking robustness and generalization through impartial cardiac motion. We also propose a lightweight network leveraging multi-scale cost volumes from spatial context alone to challenge the advanced spatiotemporal point tracking models. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our strategies significantly improves models' performances over their baselines, even for out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. For instance, EchoTracker boosts overall position accuracy by 60.7% and reduces median trajectory error by 61.5% across heart cycle phases. Interestingly, several point tracking models fail to outperform our proposed simple model in terms of tracking accuracy and generalization, reflecting their limitations when applied to echocardiography. Nevertheless, clinical evaluation reveals that these methods improve GLS measurements, aligning more closely with expert-validated, semi-automated tools and thus demonstrating better reproducibility in real-world applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

BACTrack: Building Appearance Collection for Aerial Tracking

Siamese network-based trackers have shown remarkable success in aerial tracking. Most previous works, however, usually perform template matching only between the initial template and the search region and thus fail to deal with rapidly changing targets that often appear in aerial tracking. As a remedy, this work presents Building Appearance Collection Tracking (BACTrack). This simple yet effective tracking framework builds a dynamic collection of target templates online and performs efficient multi-template matching to achieve robust tracking. Specifically, BACTrack mainly comprises a Mixed-Temporal Transformer (MTT) and an appearance discriminator. The former is responsible for efficiently building relationships between the search region and multiple target templates in parallel through a mixed-temporal attention mechanism. At the same time, the appearance discriminator employs an online adaptive template-update strategy to ensure that the collected multiple templates remain reliable and diverse, allowing them to closely follow rapid changes in the target's appearance and suppress background interference during tracking. Extensive experiments show that our BACTrack achieves top performance on four challenging aerial tracking benchmarks while maintaining an impressive speed of over 87 FPS on a single GPU. Speed tests on embedded platforms also validate our potential suitability for deployment on UAV platforms.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

Towards Effective Multi-Moving-Camera Tracking: A New Dataset and Lightweight Link Model

Ensuring driving safety for autonomous vehicles has become increasingly crucial, highlighting the need for systematic tracking of on-road pedestrians. Most vehicles are equipped with visual sensors, however, the large-scale visual data has not been well studied yet. Multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) tracking systems are composed of two modules: single-camera tracking (SCT) and inter-camera tracking (ICT). To reliably coordinate between them, MTMC tracking has been a very complicated task, while tracking across multiple moving cameras makes it even more challenging. In this paper, we focus on multi-target multi-moving-camera (MTMMC) tracking, which is attracting increasing attention from the research community. Observing there are few datasets for MTMMC tracking, we collect a new dataset, called Multi-Moving-Camera Track (MMCT), which contains sequences under various driving scenarios. To address the common problems of identity switch easily faced by most existing SCT trackers, especially for moving cameras due to ego-motion between the camera and targets, a lightweight appearance-free global link model, called Linker, is proposed to mitigate the identity switch by associating two disjoint tracklets of the same target into a complete trajectory within the same camera. Incorporated with Linker, existing SCT trackers generally obtain a significant improvement. Moreover, to alleviate the impact of the image style variations caused by different cameras, a color transfer module is effectively incorporated to extract cross-camera consistent appearance features for pedestrian association across moving cameras for ICT, resulting in a much improved MTMMC tracking system, which can constitute a step further towards coordinated mining of multiple moving cameras. The project page is available at https://dhu-mmct.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

UniMTS: Unified Pre-training for Motion Time Series

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024

SAM 2++: Tracking Anything at Any Granularity

Video tracking aims at finding the specific target in subsequent frames given its initial state. Due to the varying granularity of target states across different tasks, most existing trackers are tailored to a single task and heavily rely on custom-designed modules within the individual task, which limits their generalization and leads to redundancy in both model design and parameters. To unify video tracking tasks, we present SAM 2++, a unified model towards tracking at any granularity, including masks, boxes, and points. First, to extend target granularity, we design task-specific prompts to encode various task inputs into general prompt embeddings, and a unified decoder to unify diverse task results into a unified form pre-output. Next, to satisfy memory matching, the core operation of tracking, we introduce a task-adaptive memory mechanism that unifies memory across different granularities. Finally, we introduce a customized data engine to support tracking training at any granularity, producing a large and diverse video tracking dataset with rich annotations at three granularities, termed Tracking-Any-Granularity, which represents a comprehensive resource for training and benchmarking on unified tracking. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks confirm that SAM 2++ sets a new state of the art across diverse tracking tasks at different granularities, establishing a unified and robust tracking framework.

APTv2: Benchmarking Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking with a Large-scale Dataset and Beyond

Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking (APT) is a critical task in detecting and monitoring the keypoints of animals across a series of video frames, which is essential for understanding animal behavior. Past works relating to animals have primarily focused on either animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation only, neglecting the integration of both aspects. The absence of comprehensive APT datasets inhibits the progression and evaluation of animal pose estimation and tracking methods based on videos, thereby constraining their real-world applications. To fill this gap, we introduce APTv2, the pioneering large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. APTv2 comprises 2,749 video clips filtered and collected from 30 distinct animal species. Each video clip includes 15 frames, culminating in a total of 41,235 frames. Following meticulous manual annotation and stringent verification, we provide high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations for a total of 84,611 animal instances, split into easy and hard subsets based on the number of instances that exists in the frame. With APTv2 as the foundation, we establish a simple baseline method named \posetrackmethodname and provide benchmarks for representative models across three tracks: (1) single-frame animal pose estimation track to evaluate both intra- and inter-domain transfer learning performance, (2) low-data transfer and generalization track to evaluate the inter-species domain generalization performance, and (3) animal pose tracking track. Our experimental results deliver key empirical insights, demonstrating that APTv2 serves as a valuable benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. It also presents new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2{https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2}.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 24, 2023

PATE: Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation

Evaluating anomaly detection algorithms in time series data is critical as inaccuracies can lead to flawed decision-making in various domains where real-time analytics and data-driven strategies are essential. Traditional performance metrics assume iid data and fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and specific characteristics of time series anomalies, such as early and delayed detections. We introduce Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation (PATE), a novel evaluation metric that incorporates the temporal relationship between prediction and anomaly intervals. PATE uses proximity-based weighting considering buffer zones around anomaly intervals, enabling a more detailed and informed assessment of a detection. Using these weights, PATE computes a weighted version of the area under the Precision and Recall curve. Our experiments with synthetic and real-world datasets show the superiority of PATE in providing more sensible and accurate evaluations than other evaluation metrics. We also tested several state-of-the-art anomaly detectors across various benchmark datasets using the PATE evaluation scheme. The results show that a common metric like Point-Adjusted F1 Score fails to characterize the detection performances well, and that PATE is able to provide a more fair model comparison. By introducing PATE, we redefine the understanding of model efficacy that steers future studies toward developing more effective and accurate detection models.

  • 3 authors
·
May 20, 2024

Seg2Track-SAM2: SAM2-based Multi-object Tracking and Segmentation for Zero-shot Generalization

Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) capabilities to operate reliably in dynamic environments. MOT ensures consistent object identity assignment and precise spatial delineation. Recent advances in foundation models, such as SAM2, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization for video segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS (MOT+Segmentation) remains limited by insufficient identity management and memory efficiency. This work introduces Seg2Track-SAM2, a framework that integrates pre-trained object detectors with SAM2 and a novel Seg2Track module to address track initialization, track management, and reinforcement. The proposed approach requires no fine-tuning and remains detector-agnostic. Experimental results on KITTI MOT and KITTI MOTS benchmarks show that Seg2Track-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, ranking fourth overall in both car and pedestrian classes on KITTI MOTS, while establishing a new benchmark in association accuracy (AssA). Furthermore, a sliding-window memory strategy reduces memory usage by up to 75% with negligible performance degradation, supporting deployment under resource constraints. These results confirm that Seg2Track-SAM2 advances MOTS by combining robust zero-shot tracking, enhanced identity preservation, and efficient memory utilization. The code is available at https://github.com/hcmr-lab/Seg2Track-SAM2

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

Samba: Synchronized Set-of-Sequences Modeling for Multiple Object Tracking

Multiple object tracking in complex scenarios - such as coordinated dance performances, team sports, or dynamic animal groups - presents unique challenges. In these settings, objects frequently move in coordinated patterns, occlude each other, and exhibit long-term dependencies in their trajectories. However, it remains a key open research question on how to model long-range dependencies within tracklets, interdependencies among tracklets, and the associated temporal occlusions. To this end, we introduce Samba, a novel linear-time set-of-sequences model designed to jointly process multiple tracklets by synchronizing the multiple selective state-spaces used to model each tracklet. Samba autoregressively predicts the future track query for each sequence while maintaining synchronized long-term memory representations across tracklets. By integrating Samba into a tracking-by-propagation framework, we propose SambaMOTR, the first tracker effectively addressing the aforementioned issues, including long-range dependencies, tracklet interdependencies, and temporal occlusions. Additionally, we introduce an effective technique for dealing with uncertain observations (MaskObs) and an efficient training recipe to scale SambaMOTR to longer sequences. By modeling long-range dependencies and interactions among tracked objects, SambaMOTR implicitly learns to track objects accurately through occlusions without any hand-crafted heuristics. Our approach significantly surpasses prior state-of-the-art on the DanceTrack, BFT, and SportsMOT datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 1

Track2View: 4D-Consistent Camera-Controlled Video Generation via Paired 3D Point Tracks

Re-rendering an existing video from a novel camera viewpoint requires the output to follow the prescribed camera trajectory while preserving the appearance and dynamics of the original scene across every frame. Existing methods rely on per-frame pose embeddings, noisy point-cloud renderings, or implicit learned correspondences, none of which provides an explicit, temporally continuous link between source and target pixels. We propose Track2View, which conditions a video diffusion transformer on paired 3D point tracks: sparse trajectories of scene points projected into both the source and target camera views. These tracks provide explicit spatiotemporal correspondences that are temporally continuous by construction, encoding what content should appear where and when. At the core of Track2View is a dual-view track conditioner that transfers visual context from source to target view through parameter-free geometric operations and learned temporal aggregation, ensuring generalization to arbitrary camera trajectories without memorizing specific motions. We further introduce a data curation pipeline that extracts one-to-one track correspondences by running a 3D point tracker on temporally concatenated multi-camera view pairs. On a 400-video benchmark spanning static and dynamic scenes, Track2View achieves state-of-the-art results across visual quality, view synchronization, and camera accuracy, reducing rotation error by 30-65% and translation error by 61-72% relative to leading baselines. Project page is available at this https URL: https://qjizhi.github.io/track2view

Multiple Object Tracking as ID Prediction

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been a long-standing challenge in video understanding. A natural and intuitive approach is to split this task into two parts: object detection and association. Most mainstream methods employ meticulously crafted heuristic techniques to maintain trajectory information and compute cost matrices for object matching. Although these methods can achieve notable tracking performance, they often require a series of elaborate handcrafted modifications while facing complicated scenarios. We believe that manually assumed priors limit the method's adaptability and flexibility in learning optimal tracking capabilities from domain-specific data. Therefore, we introduce a new perspective that treats Multiple Object Tracking as an in-context ID Prediction task, transforming the aforementioned object association into an end-to-end trainable task. Based on this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed MOTIP. Given a set of trajectories carried with ID information, MOTIP directly decodes the ID labels for current detections to accomplish the association process. Without using tailored or sophisticated architectures, our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks by solely leveraging object-level features as tracking cues. The simplicity and impressive results of MOTIP leave substantial room for future advancements, thereby making it a promising baseline for subsequent research. Our code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOTIP.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

TrackNet: A Deep Learning Network for Tracking High-speed and Tiny Objects in Sports Applications

Ball trajectory data are one of the most fundamental and useful information in the evaluation of players' performance and analysis of game strategies. Although vision-based object tracking techniques have been developed to analyze sport competition videos, it is still challenging to recognize and position a high-speed and tiny ball accurately. In this paper, we develop a deep learning network, called TrackNet, to track the tennis ball from broadcast videos in which the ball images are small, blurry, and sometimes with afterimage tracks or even invisible. The proposed heatmap-based deep learning network is trained to not only recognize the ball image from a single frame but also learn flying patterns from consecutive frames. TrackNet takes images with a size of 640times360 to generate a detection heatmap from either a single frame or several consecutive frames to position the ball and can achieve high precision even on public domain videos. The network is evaluated on the video of the men's singles final at the 2017 Summer Universiade, which is available on YouTube. The precision, recall, and F1-measure of TrackNet reach 99.7%, 97.3%, and 98.5%, respectively. To prevent overfitting, 9 additional videos are partially labeled together with a subset from the previous dataset to implement 10-fold cross-validation, and the precision, recall, and F1-measure are 95.3%, 75.7%, and 84.3%, respectively. A conventional image processing algorithm is also implemented to compare with TrackNet. Our experiments indicate that TrackNet outperforms conventional method by a big margin and achieves exceptional ball tracking performance. The dataset and demo video are available at https://nol.cs.nctu.edu.tw/ndo3je6av9/.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8, 2019 1

TRACE-C: Rank-Calibrated Relational Anomaly Detection for Multi-Stream Operational Telemetry

Operational telemetry can be jointly anomalous while every individual stream stays inside its familiar range. TRACE-C is an auditable strictly-prior rank-calibrated detector for aligned multi-stream telemetry: same-regime rolling median/MAD residuals feed three window channels -- a maximum normalized local sum, a Gaussian copula-form dependence contrast on robust-z residuals, and a worst standardized AR(1) innovation -- whose channel ranks are Fisher-aggregated and ranked against earlier aggregates. We evaluate six Great Britain grid streams with a January-April 2019 fit, July-December 2019 development evidence, and a 2020 hold-out frozen before inspection. TRACE-C ranks Storm Atiyah first among 2019 test windows, but a disclosed channel ablation attributes that rank to the local channel, not the copula-form channel: copula-only ranks Atiyah 59th. The short 9 August frequency event is ranked far lower by the fused detector (143) than by the temporal channel alone (40), and reconstruction baselines rank it first. In 2020 no window is selected, which is consistent with record-rule saturation rather than an uneventful year; the highest-ranked frozen window was later interpreted as Storm Ellen. Three interpretive limits carry throughout. The resulting p-values are selection quantities, not event probabilities. The copula-form channel is not a literal copula density: the method applies no probability-integral or normal-score transform. Empirical rank counts are diagnostics, not coverage or false-discovery proofs. Every table and figure in this paper is generated from committed machine-readable reports.

  • 1 authors
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Aug 21

Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking

Kalman filter (KF) based methods for multi-object tracking (MOT) make an assumption that objects move linearly. While this assumption is acceptable for very short periods of occlusion, linear estimates of motion for prolonged time can be highly inaccurate. Moreover, when there is no measurement available to update Kalman filter parameters, the standard convention is to trust the priori state estimations for posteriori update. This leads to the accumulation of errors during a period of occlusion. The error causes significant motion direction variance in practice. In this work, we show that a basic Kalman filter can still obtain state-of-the-art tracking performance if proper care is taken to fix the noise accumulated during occlusion. Instead of relying only on the linear state estimate (i.e., estimation-centric approach), we use object observations (i.e., the measurements by object detector) to compute a virtual trajectory over the occlusion period to fix the error accumulation of filter parameters during the occlusion period. This allows more time steps to correct errors accumulated during occlusion. We name our method Observation-Centric SORT (OC-SORT). It remains Simple, Online, and Real-Time but improves robustness during occlusion and non-linear motion. Given off-the-shelf detections as input, OC-SORT runs at 700+ FPS on a single CPU. It achieves state-of-the-art on multiple datasets, including MOT17, MOT20, KITTI, head tracking, and especially DanceTrack where the object motion is highly non-linear. The code and models are available at https://github.com/noahcao/OC_SORT.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2022

Trackastra: Transformer-based cell tracking for live-cell microscopy

Cell tracking is a ubiquitous image analysis task in live-cell microscopy. Unlike multiple object tracking (MOT) for natural images, cell tracking typically involves hundreds of similar-looking objects that can divide in each frame, making it a particularly challenging problem. Current state-of-the-art approaches follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, i.e. first all cells are detected per frame and successively linked in a second step to form biologically consistent cell tracks. Linking is commonly solved via discrete optimization methods, which require manual tuning of hyperparameters for each dataset and are therefore cumbersome to use in practice. Here we propose Trackastra, a general purpose cell tracking approach that uses a simple transformer architecture to directly learn pairwise associations of cells within a temporal window from annotated data. Importantly, unlike existing transformer-based MOT pipelines, our learning architecture also accounts for dividing objects such as cells and allows for accurate tracking even with simple greedy linking, thus making strides towards removing the requirement for a complex linking step. The proposed architecture operates on the full spatio-temporal context of detections within a time window by avoiding the computational burden of processing dense images. We show that our tracking approach performs on par with or better than highly tuned state-of-the-art cell tracking algorithms for various biological datasets, such as bacteria, cell cultures and fluorescent particles. We provide code at https://github.com/weigertlab/trackastra.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024

APT-36K: A Large-scale Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking

Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting real-world applications, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. Specifically, APT-36K consists of 2,400 video clips collected and filtered from 30 animal species with 15 frames for each video, resulting in 36,000 frames in total. After manual annotation and careful double-check, high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations are provided for all the animal instances. Based on APT-36K, we benchmark several representative models on the following three tracks: (1) supervised animal pose estimation on a single frame under intra- and inter-domain transfer learning settings, (2) inter-species domain generalization test for unseen animals, and (3) animal pose estimation with animal tracking. Based on the experimental results, we gain some empirical insights and show that APT-36K provides a valuable animal pose estimation and tracking benchmark, offering new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/pandorgan/APT-36K.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2022

SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes

Multi-object tracking in sports scenes plays a critical role in gathering players statistics, supporting further analysis, such as automatic tactical analysis. Yet existing MOT benchmarks cast little attention on the domain, limiting its development. In this work, we present a new large-scale multi-object tracking dataset in diverse sports scenes, coined as SportsMOT, where all players on the court are supposed to be tracked. It consists of 240 video sequences, over 150K frames (almost 15\times MOT17) and over 1.6M bounding boxes (3\times MOT17) collected from 3 sports categories, including basketball, volleyball and football. Our dataset is characterized with two key properties: 1) fast and variable-speed motion and 2) similar yet distinguishable appearance. We expect SportsMOT to encourage the MOT trackers to promote in both motion-based association and appearance-based association. We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers and reveal the key challenge of SportsMOT lies in object association. To alleviate the issue, we further propose a new multi-object tracking framework, termed as MixSort, introducing a MixFormer-like structure as an auxiliary association model to prevailing tracking-by-detection trackers. By integrating the customized appearance-based association with the original motion-based association, MixSort achieves state-of-the-art performance on SportsMOT and MOT17. Based on MixSort, we give an in-depth analysis and provide some profound insights into SportsMOT. The dataset and code will be available at https://deeperaction.github.io/datasets/sportsmot.html.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 11, 2023

A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Time Series: Forecasting, Classification, Imputation, and Anomaly Detection

Time series are the primary data type used to record dynamic system measurements and generated in great volume by both physical sensors and online processes (virtual sensors). Time series analytics is therefore crucial to unlocking the wealth of information implicit in available data. With the recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), there has been a surge in GNN-based approaches for time series analysis. These approaches can explicitly model inter-temporal and inter-variable relationships, which traditional and other deep neural network-based methods struggle to do. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of graph neural networks for time series analysis (GNN4TS), encompassing four fundamental dimensions: forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and imputation. Our aim is to guide designers and practitioners to understand, build applications, and advance research of GNN4TS. At first, we provide a comprehensive task-oriented taxonomy of GNN4TS. Then, we present and discuss representative research works and introduce mainstream applications of GNN4TS. A comprehensive discussion of potential future research directions completes the survey. This survey, for the first time, brings together a vast array of knowledge on GNN-based time series research, highlighting foundations, practical applications, and opportunities of graph neural networks for time series analysis.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2023

TrackID3x3: A Dataset and Algorithm for Multi-Player Tracking with Identification and Pose Estimation in 3x3 Basketball Full-court Videos

Multi-object tracking, player identification, and pose estimation are fundamental components of sports analytics, essential for analyzing player movements, performance, and tactical strategies. However, existing datasets and methodologies primarily target mainstream team sports such as soccer and conventional 5-on-5 basketball, often overlooking scenarios involving fixed-camera setups commonly used at amateur levels, less mainstream sports, or datasets that explicitly incorporate pose annotations. In this paper, we propose the TrackID3x3 dataset, the first publicly available comprehensive dataset specifically designed for multi-player tracking, player identification, and pose estimation in 3x3 basketball scenarios. The dataset comprises three distinct subsets (Indoor fixed-camera, Outdoor fixed-camera, and Drone camera footage), capturing diverse full-court camera perspectives and environments. We also introduce the Track-ID task, a simplified variant of the game state reconstruction task that excludes field detection and focuses exclusively on fixed-camera scenarios. To evaluate performance, we propose a baseline algorithm called Track-ID algorithm, tailored to assess tracking and identification quality. Furthermore, our benchmark experiments, utilizing recent multi-object tracking algorithms (e.g., BoT-SORT-ReID) and top-down pose estimation methods (HRNet, RTMPose, and SwinPose), demonstrate robust results and highlight remaining challenges. Our dataset and evaluation benchmarks provide a solid foundation for advancing automated analytics in 3x3 basketball. Dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/open-starlab/TrackID3x3.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 23, 2025

TrackNetV5: Residual-Driven Spatio-Temporal Refinement and Motion Direction Decoupling for Fast Object Tracking

The TrackNet series has established a strong baseline for fast-moving small object tracking in sports. However, existing iterations face significant limitations: V1-V3 struggle with occlusions due to a reliance on purely visual cues, while TrackNetV4, despite introducing motion inputs, suffers from directional ambiguity as its absolute difference method discards motion polarity. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose TrackNetV5, a robust architecture integrating two novel mechanisms. First, to recover lost directional priors, we introduce the Motion Direction Decoupling (MDD) module. Unlike V4, MDD decomposes temporal dynamics into signed polarity fields, explicitly encoding both movement occurrence and trajectory direction. Second, we propose the Residual-Driven Spatio-Temporal Refinement (R-STR) head. Operating on a coarse-to-fine paradigm, this Transformer-based module leverages factorized spatio-temporal contexts to estimate a corrective residual, effectively recovering occluded targets. Extensive experiments on the TrackNetV2 dataset demonstrate that TrackNetV5 achieves a new state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.9859 and an accuracy of 0.9733, significantly outperforming previous versions. Notably, this performance leap is achieved with a marginal 3.7% increase in FLOPs compared to V4, maintaining real-time inference capabilities while delivering superior tracking precision.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 12

MambaEVT: Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking using State Space Model

Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 19, 2024 2

Segment Anything with Motion, Geometry, and Semantic Adaptation for Complex Nonlinear Visual Object Tracking

Traditional visual object tracking (VOT) methods typically rely on task-specific supervised training, limiting their generalization to unseen objects and challenging scenarios with distractors, occlusion, and nonlinear motion. Recent vision foundation models, exemplified by SAM 2, learn strong video understanding priors from large-scale pretraining and offer a promising foundation for building more robust and generalizable trackers. However, directly applying SAM 2 to VOT remains suboptimal, as it does not explicitly model target motion dynamics or enforce geometric and semantic consistency across frames, both of which are essential for reliable tracking. To address this issue, we propose SAMOSA, a new tracking framework that adapts SAM 2 to complex VOT scenarios by explicitly leveraging motion, geometry, and semantic cues. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight nonlinear motion predictor to model target dynamics and guide mask selection as well as memory filtering. We further exploit semantic cues to detect target shifts and recover from tracking failures, while geometric cues are incorporated as structural constraints to improve tracking stability. In this way, SAMOSA bridges the gap between the implicit video understanding prior of SAM 2 and explicit tracking-oriented modeling. Extensive experiments show that SAMOSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SAM 2--based approaches on general benchmarks, demonstrates stronger generalization than supervised VOT methods, and achieves substantial gains on anti-UAV datasets, which typify complex nonlinear motion scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/DurYi/SAMOSA.

Beyond MOT: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking

Current multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to predict trajectories of targets (i.e., ''where'') in videos. Yet, knowing merely ''where'' is insufficient in many crucial applications. In comparison, semantic understanding such as fine-grained behaviors, interactions, and overall summarized captions (i.e., ''what'') from videos, associated with ''where'', is highly-desired for comprehensive video analysis. Thus motivated, we introduce Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT), that aims to estimate object trajectories and meanwhile understand semantic details of associated trajectories including instance captions, instance interactions, and overall video captions, integrating ''where'' and ''what'' for tracking. In order to foster the exploration of SMOT, we propose BenSMOT, a large-scale Benchmark for Semantic MOT. Specifically, BenSMOT comprises 3,292 videos with 151K frames, covering various scenarios for semantic tracking of humans. BenSMOT provides annotations for the trajectories of targets, along with associated instance captions in natural language, instance interactions, and overall caption for each video sequence. To our best knowledge, BenSMOT is the first publicly available benchmark for SMOT. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a novel tracker named SMOTer, which is specially designed and end-to-end trained for SMOT, showing promising performance. By releasing BenSMOT, we expect to go beyond conventional MOT by predicting ''where'' and ''what'' for SMOT, opening up a new direction in tracking for video understanding. We will release BenSMOT and SMOTer at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/SMOTer.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024

Social-Implicit: Rethinking Trajectory Prediction Evaluation and The Effectiveness of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation

Best-of-N (BoN) Average Displacement Error (ADE)/ Final Displacement Error (FDE) is the most used metric for evaluating trajectory prediction models. Yet, the BoN does not quantify the whole generated samples, resulting in an incomplete view of the model's prediction quality and performance. We propose a new metric, Average Mahalanobis Distance (AMD) to tackle this issue. AMD is a metric that quantifies how close the whole generated samples are to the ground truth. We also introduce the Average Maximum Eigenvalue (AMV) metric that quantifies the overall spread of the predictions. Our metrics are validated empirically by showing that the ADE/FDE is not sensitive to distribution shifts, giving a biased sense of accuracy, unlike the AMD/AMV metrics. We introduce the usage of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) as a replacement for traditional generative models to train our model, Social-Implicit. IMLE training mechanism aligns with AMD/AMV objective of predicting trajectories that are close to the ground truth with a tight spread. Social-Implicit is a memory efficient deep model with only 5.8K parameters that runs in real time of about 580Hz and achieves competitive results. Interactive demo of the problem can be seen at https://www.abduallahmohamed.com/social-implicit-amdamv-adefde-demo . Code is available at https://github.com/abduallahmohamed/Social-Implicit .

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6, 2022

MVTD: A Benchmark Dataset for Maritime Visual Object Tracking

Visual Object Tracking (VOT) is a fundamental task with widespread applications in autonomous navigation, surveillance, and maritime robotics. Despite significant advances in generic object tracking, maritime environments continue to present unique challenges, including specular water reflections, low-contrast targets, dynamically changing backgrounds, and frequent occlusions. These complexities significantly degrade the performance of state-of-the-art tracking algorithms, highlighting the need for domain-specific datasets. To address this gap, we introduce the Maritime Visual Tracking Dataset (MVTD), a comprehensive and publicly available benchmark specifically designed for maritime VOT. MVTD comprises 182 high-resolution video sequences, totaling approximately 150,000 frames, and includes four representative object classes: boat, ship, sailboat, and unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The dataset captures a diverse range of operational conditions and maritime scenarios, reflecting the real-world complexities of maritime environments. We evaluated 14 recent SOTA tracking algorithms on the MVTD benchmark and observed substantial performance degradation compared to their performance on general-purpose datasets. However, when fine-tuned on MVTD, these models demonstrate significant performance gains, underscoring the effectiveness of domain adaptation and the importance of transfer learning in specialized tracking contexts. The MVTD dataset fills a critical gap in the visual tracking community by providing a realistic and challenging benchmark for maritime scenarios. Dataset and Source Code can be accessed here "https://github.com/AhsanBaidar/MVTD".

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

Training for the Model You Return: Improving Optimization for Iterate-Averaged Language Models

Many modern Language Model (LM) pipelines return an averaged model, such as an exponential moving average of the training iterates, rather than the final iterate itself. This raises a fundamental question: given that we will return an iterate average, how should we change training to improve the performance of this average? We study this question by formulating optimizer design for the iterate-average estimator as an optimal-control problem. In a continuous-time stochastic quadratic model, we solve for the control strategy that minimizes the error of the returned average subject to a penalty on the size of the intervention. A practical approximation to this controller yields PACE, a lightweight wrapper around AdamW that pulls the live weights toward their exponential moving average with a clipped, per-coordinate control strength. We prove that a stylized version of PACE converges at the standard stochastic convex optimization rate, up to a factor depending on the averaging rule, while in the quadratic setting it can strictly improve the limiting squared error of the iterate-average estimator and can do so by an arbitrarily large factor on some instances. Empirically, our results suggest that PACE improves over AdamW and EMA-evaluated AdamW in supervised fine-tuning of 1-2B parameter LMs and in GPT-2 pretraining on FineWeb for a wide range of learning rates, decay schedules, and other hyperparameters.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 29