# SimpleTrack: Rethinking and Improving the JDE Approach for Multi-Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03985 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03985/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (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)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12605/) (2019)
- [CrowdHuman: A Benchmark for Detecting Human in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00123/) (2018)
- [Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06664/) (2020)
- [Joint Detection and Identification Feature Learning for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01850/) (2016)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [Person Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02531/) (2016)
- [Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08808/) (2021)
- [Learning to Track with Object Permanence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14258/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the competition between detection and ReID in Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12138/) (2020)
- [Real-time Multiple People Tracking with Deeply Learned Candidate Selection and Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04427/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Temporal Relation Networks for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11489/) (2019)
- [RetinaTrack: Online Single Stage Joint Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13870/) (2020)
- [Multiple Object Tracking with Correlation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03541/) (2021)
- [RelationTrack: Relation-aware Multiple Object Tracking with Decoupled Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04322/) (2021)
- [MAT: Motion-Aware Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04794/) (2020)
- [VoxelTrack: Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02452/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Tracklet Scoring and Inpainting for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02337/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BoostTrack++: using tracklet information to detect more objects in multiple object tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13003/) (2024)
- [R-LiViT: A LiDAR-Visual-Thermal Dataset Enabling Vulnerable Road User Focused Roadside Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17122/) (2025)
- [AgriSORT: A Simple Online Real-time Tracking-by-Detection framework for robotics in precision agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13393/) (2023)
- [YOLO11-JDE: Fast and Accurate Multi-Object Tracking with Self-Supervised Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13710/) (2025)
- [Does Appearance Help? A Systematic Study of Image-Based Re-Identification in Online 3D Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07233/) (2026)
- [Glance-MCMT: A General MCMT Framework with Glance Initialization and Progressive Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10115/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Joint detection and embedding (JDE) based methods usually estimate bounding boxes and embedding features of objects with a single network in Multi-Object Tracking (MOT). In the tracking stage, JDE-based methods fuse the target motion information and appearance information by applying the same rule, which could fail when the target is briefly lost or blocked. To overcome this problem, we propose a new association matrix, the Embedding and Giou matrix, which combines embedding cosine distance and Giou distance of objects. To further improve the performance of data association, we develop a simple, effective tracker named SimpleTrack, which designs a bottom-up fusion method for Re-identity and proposes a new tracking strategy based on our EG matrix. The experimental results indicate that SimpleTrack has powerful data association capability, e.g., 61.6 HOTA and 76.3 IDF1 on MOT17. In addition, we apply the EG matrix to 5 different state-of-the-art JDE-based methods and achieve significant improvements in IDF1, HOTA and IDsw metrics, and increase the tracking speed of these methods by about 20%.