# PTB-TIR: A Thermal Infrared Pedestrian Tracking Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05944/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [Anti-UAV: A Large Multi-Modal Benchmark for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08466/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Thermal Spectrum for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09854/) (2021)
- [InfraParis: A multi-modal and multi-task autonomous driving dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15751/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Thermal Modality to Enhance Reconstruction in Low-Light Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14053/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Thermal Imaging on Embedded GPU Platforms for Application in Vehicular Assistance Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01661/) (2022)
- [SOTVerse: A User-defined Task Space of Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07414/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Domain Adaptation of Deep Regression Trackers via Reinforced Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14496/) (2021)
- [Computer Vision for Clinical Gait Analysis: A Gait Abnormality Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04190/) (2024)
- [M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16318/) (2025)
- [CST Anti-UAV: A Thermal Infrared Benchmark for Tiny UAV Tracking in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23473/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Infrared Image and Video Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08581/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Modal Distillation for Thermal Infrared Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00187/) (2021)
- [Implicit Multi-Spectral Transformer: An Lightweight and Effective Visible to Infrared Image Translation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07072/) (2024)
- [Predictive Visual Tracking: A New Benchmark and Baseline Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04508/) (2021)
- [PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11629/) (2022)
- [The MONET dataset: Multimodal drone thermal dataset recorded in rural scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05417/) (2023)
- [Vulnerable Road User Detection and Safety Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19202/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Thermal MOT: A Novel Box Association Method Leveraging Thermal Identity and Motion Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12943/) (2024)
- [In Defense and Revival of Bayesian Filtering for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17098/) (2024)
- [Fisheye Camera and Ultrasonic Sensor Fusion For Near-Field Obstacle Perception in Bird's-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00637/) (2024)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19430/) (2024)
- [SMMT: Siamese Motion Mamba with Self-attention for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04088/) (2025)
- [A Novel Tuning Method for Real-time Multiple-Object Tracking Utilizing Thermal Sensor with Complexity Motion Pattern](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02408/) (2025)
- [Searching a Lightweight Network Architecture for Thermal Infrared Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16570/) (2024)
- [Coordinate-Aware Thermal Infrared Tracking Via Natural Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08265/) (2024)
- [Performance Evaluation of Deep Learning-based Quadrotor UAV Detection and Tracking Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00285/) (2024)
- [CapHDR2IR: Caption-Driven Transfer from Visible Light to Infrared Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16327/) (2024)
- [RAMCT: Novel Region-adaptive Multi-channel Tracker with Iterative Tikhonov Regularization for Thermal Infrared Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14278/) (2025)
- [FGSGT: Saliency-Guided Siamese Network Tracker Based on Key Fine-Grained Feature Information for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14309/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Thermal infrared (TIR) pedestrian tracking is one of the important components among numerous applications of computer vision, which has a major advantage: it can track pedestrians in total darkness. The ability to evaluate the TIR pedestrian tracker fairly, on a benchmark dataset, is significant for the development of this field. However, there is not a benchmark dataset. In this paper, we develop a TIR pedestrian tracking dataset for the TIR pedestrian tracker evaluation. The dataset includes 60 thermal sequences with manual annotations. Each sequence has nine attribute labels for the attribute based evaluation. In addition to the dataset, we carry out the large-scale evaluation experiments on our benchmark dataset using nine publicly available trackers. The experimental results help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of these trackers.In addition, in order to gain more insight into the TIR pedestrian tracker, we divide its functions into three components: feature extractor, motion model, and observation model. Then, we conduct three comparison experiments on our benchmark dataset to validate how each component affects the tracker's performance. The findings of these experiments provide some guidelines for future research. The dataset and evaluation toolkit can be downloaded at {https://github.com/QiaoLiuHit/PTB-TIR_Evaluation_toolkit}.