# Transformer-based assignment decision network for multiple object tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08808/) (2021)
- [MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07548/) (2020)
- [UA-DETRAC: A New Benchmark and Protocol for Multi-Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04136/) (2015)
- [TransMOT: Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00194/) (2021)
- [Learning to Detect and Track Visible and Occluded Body Joints in a Virtual World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08319/) (2018)
- [Deep Affinity Network for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11780/) (2018)
- [Learning by tracking: Siamese CNN for robust target association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07866/) (2016)
- [Online Multi-Object Tracking with Dual Matching Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00749/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How to Backpropagate through Hungarian in Your DETR?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14448/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data association is a crucial component for any multiple object tracking (MOT) method that follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm. To generate complete trajectories such methods employ a data association process to establish assignments between detections and existing targets during each timestep. Recent data association approaches try to solve either a multi-dimensional linear assignment task or a network flow minimization problem or tackle it via multiple hypotheses tracking. However, during inference an optimization step that computes optimal assignments is required for every sequence frame inducing additional complexity to any given solution. To this end, in the context of this work we introduce Transformer-based Assignment Decision Network (TADN) that tackles data association without the need of any explicit optimization during inference. In particular, TADN can directly infer assignment pairs between detections and active targets in a single forward pass of the network. We have integrated TADN in a rather simple MOT framework, designed a novel training strategy for efficient end-to-end training and demonstrated the high potential of our approach for online visual tracking-by-detection MOT on several popular benchmarks, i.e. MOT17, MOT20 and UA-DETRAC. Our proposed approach demonstrates strong performance in most evaluation metrics despite its simple nature as a tracker lacking significant auxiliary components such as occlusion handling or re-identification. The implementation of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/psaltaath/tadn-mot.