# Beyond MOT: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2024.

## 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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Masked Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00819/) (2018)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Perceive Anything: Recognize, Explain, Caption, and Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05302/) (2025)
- [Omni-RGPT: Unifying Image and Video Region-level Understanding via Token Marks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08326/) (2025)
- [INST-IT: Boosting Instance Understanding via Explicit Visual Prompt Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03565/) (2024)
- [LMMs Meet Object-Centric Vision: Understanding, Segmentation, Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11789/) (2026)
- [OmniTrack++: Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking by Learning Large-FoV Trajectory Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00510/) (2025)
- [VoCap: Video Object Captioning and Segmentation from Any Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21809/) (2025)
- [CaptionFormer: Unified Segmentation, Tracking, and Captioning for Spatio-Temporal Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14904/) (2025)
- [ATSTrack: Enhancing Visual-Language Tracking by Aligning Temporal and Spatial Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00454/) (2025)
- [CrowdTrack: A Benchmark for Difficult Multiple Pedestrian Tracking in Real Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02479/) (2025)
- [LOST-3DSG: Lightweight Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs with Semantic Tracking in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02905/) (2026)
- [Scene Graph-guided SegCaptioning Transformer with Fine-grained Alignment for Controllable Video Segmentation and Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20887/) (2026)
- [SceneForesee: Learning Scene Evolution for Spatiotemporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14439/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to predict trajectories of targets (i.e., ''where'') in videos. Yet, knowing merely ''where'' is insufficient in many crucial applications. In comparison, semantic understanding such as fine-grained behaviors, interactions, and overall summarized captions (i.e., ''what'') from videos, associated with ''where'', is highly-desired for comprehensive video analysis. Thus motivated, we introduce Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT), that aims to estimate object trajectories and meanwhile understand semantic details of associated trajectories including instance captions, instance interactions, and overall video captions, integrating ''where'' and ''what'' for tracking. In order to foster the exploration of SMOT, we propose BenSMOT, a large-scale Benchmark for Semantic MOT. Specifically, BenSMOT comprises 3,292 videos with 151K frames, covering various scenarios for semantic tracking of humans. BenSMOT provides annotations for the trajectories of targets, along with associated instance captions in natural language, instance interactions, and overall caption for each video sequence. To our best knowledge, BenSMOT is the first publicly available benchmark for SMOT. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a novel tracker named SMOTer, which is specially designed and end-to-end trained for SMOT, showing promising performance. By releasing BenSMOT, we expect to go beyond conventional MOT by predicting ''where'' and ''what'' for SMOT, opening up a new direction in tracking for video understanding. We will release BenSMOT and SMOTer at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/SMOTer.