# SPAMming Labels: Efficient Annotations for the Trackers of Tomorrow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11426 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11426/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (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)
- [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)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Space-Time Correspondence as a Contrastive Random Walk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14613/) (2020)
- [MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03604/) (2019)
- [Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06664/) (2020)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07515/) (2019)
- [Joint Detection and Identification Feature Learning for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01850/) (2016)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [Tracking Emerges by Colorizing Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09594/) (2018)
- [Person Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02531/) (2016)
- [MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07548/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [NOOUGAT: Towards Unified Online and Offline Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02111/) (2025)
- [Clip-level Uncertainty and Temporal-aware Active Learning for End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09858/) (2026)
- [TrackRef3D: Multi-View Consistent Track-then-Label for Open-World Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26576/) (2026)
- [SAM2Auto: Auto Annotation Using FLASH](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07850/) (2025)
- [SelfMOTR: Revisiting MOTR with Self-Generating Detection Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20279/) (2025)
- [Probing Association Instability with Track-State Perturbations for Clip-Level Active Learning in Query-Propagation Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17224/) (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)

Increasing the annotation efficiency of trajectory annotations from videos has the potential to enable the next generation of data-hungry tracking algorithms to thrive on large-scale datasets. Despite the importance of this task, there are currently very few works exploring how to efficiently label tracking datasets comprehensively. In this work, we introduce SPAM, a video label engine that provides high-quality labels with minimal human intervention. SPAM is built around two key insights: i) most tracking scenarios can be easily resolved. To take advantage of this, we utilize a pre-trained model to generate high-quality pseudo-labels, reserving human involvement for a smaller subset of more difficult instances; ii) handling the spatiotemporal dependencies of track annotations across time can be elegantly and efficiently formulated through graphs. Therefore, we use a unified graph formulation to address the annotation of both detections and identity association for tracks across time. Based on these insights, SPAM produces high-quality annotations with a fraction of ground truth labeling cost. We demonstrate that trackers trained on SPAM labels achieve comparable performance to those trained on human annotations while requiring only 3-20% of the human labeling effort. Hence, SPAM paves the way towards highly efficient labeling of large-scale tracking datasets. We release all models and code.