ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box

TL;DR

ByteTrack introduces a simple yet effective multi-object tracking method that associates almost every detection, including low-score ones, leading to significant improvements in tracking accuracy across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel association method that recovers true objects from low-score detections and integrates it into a strong tracker, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Findings

Achieves 80.3 MOTA on MOT17 test set.

Improves IDF1 scores by 1-10 points across trackers.

State-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.

Abstract

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, tracking by associating almost every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. When applied to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers, our method achieves consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. ByteTrack also achieves state-of-the-art performance on MOT20, HiEve and BDD100K tracking benchmarks. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.