# BASE: Probably a Better Approach to Multi-Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12035 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12035/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CrowdHuman: A Benchmark for Detecting Human in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00123/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [MOTRv2: Bootstrapping End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking by Pretrained Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09791/) (2022)
- [MOTChallenge 2015: Towards a Benchmark for Multi-Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01942/) (2015)
- [Towards Grand Unification of Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07078/) (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)
- [MotionTrack: Learning Robust Short-term and Long-term Motions for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10404/) (2023)
- [Unifying Short and Long-Term Tracking with Graph Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03038/) (2022)
- [Focus On Details: Online Multi-object Tracking with Diverse Fine-grained Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14589/) (2023)
- [Looking Beyond Two Frames: End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking Using Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14829/) (2021)
- [Occlusion-Robust Online Multi-Object Visual Tracking using a GM-PHD Filter with CNN-Based Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05949/) (2019)
- [Robust Online Multi-target Visual Tracking using a HISP Filter with Discriminative Deep Appearance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03945/) (2019)
- [Fast Online and Relational Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03659/) (2022)

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

- [SFSORT: Scene Features-based Simple Online Real-Time Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07553/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of visual object tracking is dominated by methods that combine simple tracking algorithms and ad hoc schemes. Probabilistic tracking algorithms, which are leading in other fields, are surprisingly absent from the leaderboards. We found that accounting for distance in target kinematics, exploiting detector confidence and modelling non-uniform clutter characteristics is critical for a probabilistic tracker to work in visual tracking. Previous probabilistic methods fail to address most or all these aspects, which we believe is why they fall so far behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (there are no probabilistic trackers in the MOT17 top 100). To rekindle progress among probabilistic approaches, we propose a set of pragmatic models addressing these challenges, and demonstrate how they can be incorporated into a probabilistic framework. We present BASE (Bayesian Approximation Single-hypothesis Estimator), a simple, performant and easily extendible visual tracker, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) on MOT17 and MOT20, without using Re-Id. Code will be made available at https://github.com/ffi-no
