# QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06984 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06984/

## Key facts

- Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [OVTrack: Open-Vocabulary Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08408/) (2023)
- [CTVIS: Consistent Training for Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12616/) (2023)
- [CC-3DT: Panoramic 3D Object Tracking via Cross-Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01247/) (2022)
- [Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13074/) (2023)
- [TOPIC: A Parallel Association Paradigm for Multi-Object Tracking under Complex Motions and Diverse Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11157/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap Between End-to-end and Non-End-to-end Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12724/) (2023)
- [Delving into the Trajectory Long-tail Distribution for Muti-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04700/) (2024)
- [SAM2MOT: A Novel Paradigm of Multi-Object Tracking by Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04519/) (2025)
- [DARTH: Holistic Test-time Adaptation for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01926/) (2023)
- [Traffic-Domain Video Question Answering with Automatic Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09636/) (2023)
- [CR3DT: Camera-RADAR Fusion for 3D Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15313/) (2024)
- [FlexEvent: Towards Flexible Event-Frame Object Detection at Varying Operational Frequencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06708/) (2024)
- [ETTrack: Enhanced Temporal Motion Predictor for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15755/) (2024)
- [ETAP: Event-based Tracking of Any Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00133/) (2024)
- [Video Task Decathlon: Unifying Image and Video Tasks in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04422/) (2023)
- [MambaMOT: State-Space Model as Motion Predictor for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10826/) (2024)
- [VISAGE: Video Instance Segmentation with Appearance-Guided Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04885/) (2023)
- [TAO-Amodal: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Object Amodally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12433/) (2023)
- [SpikeMOT: Event-based Multi-Object Tracking with Sparse Motion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16987/) (2023)
- [Temporal-Enhanced Multimodal Transformer for Referring Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13437/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Robust Multi-Object Tracking via Fusion of mmWave Radar and Camera Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08049/) (2024)
- [OVT-B: A New Large-Scale Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17534/) (2024)
- [Advances and Applications of Computer Vision Techniques in Vehicle Trajectory Generation and Surrogate Traffic Safety Indicators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15231/) (2023)
- [UncertaintyTrack: Exploiting Detection and Localization Uncertainty in Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12303/) (2024)
- [Walker: Self-supervised Multiple Object Tracking by Walking on Temporal Appearance Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17221/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Multi-Object Tracking: A Comprehensive Survey from Foundations to State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13457/) (2025)
- [Deep HM-SORT: Enhancing Multi-Object Tracking in Sports with Deep Features, Harmonic Mean, and Expansion IOU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12081/) (2024)
- [HybridTrack: A Hybrid Approach for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01275/) (2025)
- [YOLO11-JDE: Fast and Accurate Multi-Object Tracking with Self-Supervised Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13710/) (2025)
- [ReaMOT: A Benchmark and Framework for Reasoning-based Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20381/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Similarity learning has been recognized as a crucial step for object tracking. However, existing multiple object tracking methods only use sparse ground truth matching as the training objective, while ignoring the majority of the informative regions in images. In this paper, we present Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning, which densely samples hundreds of object regions on a pair of images for contrastive learning. We combine this similarity learning with multiple existing object detectors to build Quasi-Dense Tracking (QDTrack), which does not require displacement regression or motion priors. We find that the resulting distinctive feature space admits a simple nearest neighbor search at inference time for object association. In addition, we show that our similarity learning scheme is not limited to video data, but can learn effective instance similarity even from static input, enabling a competitive tracking performance without training on videos or using tracking supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide variety of popular MOT benchmarks. We find that, despite its simplicity, QDTrack rivals the performance of state-of-the-art tracking methods on all benchmarks and sets a new state-of-the-art on the large-scale BDD100K MOT benchmark, while introducing negligible computational overhead to the detector.