# Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12605/) (2019)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05170/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06918/) (2022)
- [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)
- [QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06984/) (2022)
- [Player Tracking and Identification in Ice Hockey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03090/) (2021)
- [Efficient tracking of team sport players with few game-specific annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04049/) (2022)
- [Single-Camera Basketball Tracker through Pose and Semantic Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02042/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Multi-Camera People Tracking with Anchor-Guided Clustering and Spatio-Temporal Consistency ID Re-Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09471/) (2023)
- [SportsTrack: An Innovative Method for Tracking Athletes in Sports Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07173/) (2022)
- [Multi-target multi-camera vehicle tracking using transformer-based camera link model and spatial-temporal information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07805/) (2023)
- [Multi-Object Tracking by Iteratively Associating Detections with Uniform Appearance for Trawl-Based Fishing Bycatch Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04816/) (2023)
- [Observation Centric and Central Distance Recovery on Sports Player Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13154/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Multiple Object Tracking as ID Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16848/) (2024)
- [SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11335/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03353/) (2023)
- [Beyond Kalman Filters: Deep Learning-Based Filters for Improved Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09865/) (2024)
- [MambaMOT: State-Space Model as Motion Predictor for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10826/) (2024)
- [Associate Everything Detected: Facilitating Tracking-by-Detection to the Unknown](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09293/) (2024)
- [Sea You Later: Metadata-Guided Long-Term Re-Identification for UAV-Based Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03561/) (2023)
- [Basketball-SORT: An Association Method for Complex Multi-object Occlusion Problems in Basketball Multi-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19655/) (2024)
- [Engineering an Efficient Object Tracker for Non-Linear Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00738/) (2024)
- [TrackID3x3: A Dataset and Algorithm for Multi-Player Tracking with Identification and Pose Estimation in 3x3 Basketball Full-court Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18282/) (2025)
- [CAMELTrack: Context-Aware Multi-cue ExpLoitation for Online Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01257/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning-Based Multi-Object Tracking: A Comprehensive Survey from Foundations to State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13457/) (2025)
- [SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19182/) (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)
- [Enhanced Multi-Object Tracking Using Pose-based Virtual Markers in 3x3 Basketball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06258/) (2024)
- [NOOUGAT: Towards Unified Online and Offline Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02111/) (2025)
- [SportMamba: Adaptive Non-Linear Multi-Object Tracking with State Space Models for Team Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03335/) (2025)
- [MVA 2025 Small Multi-Object Tracking for Spotting Birds Challenge: Dataset, Methods, and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12832/) (2025)
- [Towards long-term player tracking with graph hierarchies and domain-specific features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21242/) (2025)
- [SCT-MOT: Enhancing Air-to-Air Multiple UAVs Tracking with Swarm-Coupled Motion and Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06883/) (2026)
- [SAMIDARE: Advanced Tracking-by-Segmentation for Dense Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22162/) (2026)
- [PLayerTV: Advanced Player Tracking and Identification for Automatic Soccer Highlight Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16076/) (2024)
- [ToddlerAct: A Toddler Action Recognition Dataset for Gross Motor Development Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00349/) (2024)
- [Learning Association via Track-Detection Matching for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22105/) (2025)
- [Group-DINOmics: Incorporating People Dynamics into DINO for Self-supervised Group Activity Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04467/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pedestrians: Caption-Guided CLIP Framework for High-Difficulty Video-based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07740/) (2026)
- [Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13033/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Long-Term Multi-Object Tracking for Sports Video Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15688/) (2026)
- [Towards Automatic Video Annotation with ASH: Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01022/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning-based object detectors have driven notable progress in multi-object tracking algorithms. Yet, current tracking methods mainly focus on simple, regular motion patterns in pedestrians or vehicles. This leaves a gap in tracking algorithms for targets with nonlinear, irregular motion, like athletes. Additionally, relying on the Kalman filter in recent tracking algorithms falls short when object motion defies its linear assumption. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel online and robust multi-object tracking approach named deep ExpansionIoU (Deep-EIoU), which focuses on multi-object tracking for sports scenarios. Unlike conventional methods, we abandon the use of the Kalman filter and leverage the iterative scale-up ExpansionIoU and deep features for robust tracking in sports scenarios. This approach achieves superior tracking performance without adopting a more robust detector, all while keeping the tracking process in an online fashion. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in tracking irregular motion objects, achieving a score of 77.2% HOTA on the SportsMOT dataset and 85.4% HOTA on the SoccerNet-Tracking dataset. It outperforms all previous state-of-the-art trackers on various large-scale multi-object tracking benchmarks, covering various kinds of sports scenarios. The code and models are available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/Deep-EIoU.