# ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/

## Key facts

- Cited by 823 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 823)

- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11481/) (2024)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)
- [MOTRv2: Bootstrapping End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking by Pretrained Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09791/) (2022)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [Deep OC-SORT: Multi-Pedestrian Tracking by Adaptive Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11813/) (2023)
- [SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05170/) (2023)
- [SimpleTrack: Understanding and Rethinking 3D Multi-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09621/) (2021)
- [In Defense of Online Models for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10661/) (2022)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [Towards Grand Unification of Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07078/) (2022)
- [Referring Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03366/) (2023)
- [ReasonNet: End-to-End Driving with Temporal and Global Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10507/) (2023)
- [TRACE: 5D Temporal Regression of Avatars with Dynamic Cameras in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02850/) (2023)
- [MeMOTR: Long-Term Memory-Augmented Transformer for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15700/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06918/) (2022)
- [General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09158/) (2023)
- [Hybrid-SORT: Weak Cues Matter for Online Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00783/) (2023)
- [Hard to Track Objects with Irregular Motions and Similar Appearances? Make It Easier by Buffering the Matching Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14317/) (2022)
- [MotionTrack: Learning Robust Short-term and Long-term Motions for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10404/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Segment Anything Model for Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08196/) (2023)
- [Unifying Short and Long-Term Tracking with Graph Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03038/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.