Open-vocabulary multiple object tracking aims to generalize trackers to unseen categories during training, enabling their application across a variety of real-world scenarios. However, the existing open-vocabulary tracker is constrained by its framework structure, isolated frame-level perception, and insufficient modal interactions, which hinder its performance in open-vocabulary classification and tracking. In this paper, we propose OVTR (End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Multiple Object Tracking with TRansformer), the first end-to-end open-vocabulary tracker that models motion, appearance, and category simultaneously. To achieve stable classification and continuous tracking, we design the CIP (Category Information Propagation) strategy, which establishes multiple high-level category information priors for subsequent frames. Additionally, we introduce a dual-branch structure for generalization capability and deep multimodal interaction, and incorporate protective strategies in the decoder to enhance performance. Experimental results show that our method surpasses previous trackers on the open-vocabulary MOT benchmark while also achieving faster inference speeds and significantly reducing preprocessing requirements. Moreover, the experiment transferring the model to another dataset demonstrates its strong adaptability. Models and code are released at https://github.com/jinyanglii/OVTR.
In this paper, we propose MOTRv2, a simple yet effective pipeline to bootstrap end-to-end multi-object tracking with a pretrained object detector. Existing end-to-end methods, MOTR and TrackFormer are inferior to their tracking-by-detection counterparts mainly due to their poor detection performance. We aim to improve MOTR by elegantly incorporating an extra object detector. We first adopt the anchor formulation of queries and then use an extra object detector to generate proposals as anchors, providing detection prior to MOTR. The simple modification greatly eases the conflict between joint learning detection and association tasks in MOTR. MOTRv2 keeps the query propogation feature and scales well on large-scale benchmarks. MOTRv2 ranks the 1st place (73.4% HOTA on DanceTrack) in the 1st Multiple People Tracking in Group Dance Challenge. Moreover, MOTRv2 reaches state-of-the-art performance on the BDD100K dataset. We hope this simple and effective pipeline can provide some new insights to the end-to-end MOT community. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/megvii-research/MOTRv2}.
We present our 1st place solution to the Group Dance Multiple People Tracking Challenge. Based on MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer, we explore: 1) detect queries as anchors, 2) tracking as query denoising, 3) joint training on pseudo video clips generated from CrowdHuman dataset, and 4) using the YOLOX detection proposals for the anchor initialization of detect queries. Our method achieves 73.4% HOTA on the DanceTrack test set, surpassing the second-place solution by +6.8% HOTA.
Transformer networks have been a focus of research in many fields in recent years, being able to surpass the state-of-the-art performance in different computer vision tasks. However, in the task of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), leveraging the power of Transformers remains relatively unexplored. Among the pioneering efforts in this domain, TransCenter, a Transformer-based MOT architecture with dense object queries, demonstrated exceptional tracking capabilities while maintaining reasonable runtime. Nonetheless, one critical aspect in MOT, track displacement estimation, presents room for enhancement to further reduce association errors. In response to this challenge, our paper introduces a novel improvement to TransCenter. We propose a post-processing mechanism grounded in the Track-by-Detection paradigm, aiming to refine the track displacement estimation. Our approach involves the integration of a carefully designed Kalman filter, which incorporates Transformer outputs into measurement error estimation, and the use of an embedding network for target re-identification. This combined strategy yields substantial improvement in the accuracy and robustness of the tracking process. We validate our contributions through comprehensive experiments on the MOTChallenge datasets MOT17 and MOT20, where our proposed approach outperforms other Transformer-based trackers. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amitgalor18/STC_Tracker
Temporal modeling of objects is a key challenge in multiple object tracking (MOT). Existing methods track by associating detections through motion-based and appearance-based similarity heuristics. The post-processing nature of association prevents end-to-end exploitation of temporal variations in video sequence. In this paper, we propose MOTR, which extends DETR and introduces track query to model the tracked instances in the entire video. Track query is transferred and updated frame-by-frame to perform iterative prediction over time. We propose tracklet-aware label assignment to train track queries and newborn object queries. We further propose temporal aggregation network and collective average loss to enhance temporal relation modeling. Experimental results on DanceTrack show that MOTR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art method, ByteTrack by 6.5% on HOTA metric. On MOT17, MOTR outperforms our concurrent works, TrackFormer and TransTrack, on association performance. MOTR can serve as a stronger baseline for future research on temporal modeling and Transformer-based trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/MOTR.
In this work, we propose TransTrack, a simple but efficient scheme to solve the multiple object tracking problems. TransTrack leverages the transformer architecture, which is an attention-based query-key mechanism. It applies object features from the previous frame as a query of the current frame and introduces a set of learned object queries to enable detecting new-coming objects. It builds up a novel joint-detection-and-tracking paradigm by accomplishing object detection and object association in a single shot, simplifying complicated multi-step settings in tracking-by-detection methods. On MOT17 and MOT20 benchmark, TransTrack achieves 74.5\% and 64.5\% MOTA, respectively, competitive to the state-of-the-art methods. We expect TransTrack to provide a novel perspective for multiple object tracking. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PeizeSun/TransTrack}.