# Enhanced Multi-Object Tracking Using Pose-based Virtual Markers in 3x3 Basketball

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06258/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Markerless tracking of user-defined features with deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03142/) (2018)
- [DeepCut: Joint Subset Partition and Labeling for Multi Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06645/) (2015)
- [SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06918/) (2022)
- [DeepSportradar-v1: Computer Vision Dataset for Sports Understanding with High Quality Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08190/) (2022)
- [TrackNet: A Deep Learning Network for Tracking High-speed and Tiny Objects in Sports Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03698/) (2019)
- [Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13074/) (2023)
- [Player Tracking and Identification in Ice Hockey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03090/) (2021)
- [Basketball-SORT: An Association Method for Complex Multi-object Occlusion Problems in Basketball Multi-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19655/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [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)
- [SoccerSynth-Detection: A Synthetic Dataset for Soccer Player Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09281/) (2025)
- [Mesh-Aware Epipolar Matching for Multi-View Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation in Basketball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29953/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is crucial for various multi-agent analyses such as evaluating team sports tactics and player movements and performance. While pedestrian tracking has advanced with Tracking-by-Detection MOT, team sports like basketball pose unique challenges. These challenges include players' unpredictable movements, frequent close interactions, and visual similarities that complicate pose labeling and lead to significant occlusions, frequent ID switches, and high manual annotation costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pose-based virtual marker (VM) MOT method for team sports, named Sports-vmTracking. This method builds on the vmTracking approach developed for multi-animal tracking with active learning. First, we constructed a 3x3 basketball pose dataset for VMs and applied active learning to enhance model performance in generating VMs. Then, we overlaid the VMs on video to identify players, extract their poses with unique IDs, and convert these into bounding boxes for comparison with automated MOT methods. Using our 3x3 basketball dataset, we demonstrated that our VM configuration has been highly effective, and reduced the need for manual corrections and labeling during pose model training while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach achieved an average HOTA score of 72.3%, over 10 points higher than other state-of-the-art methods without VM, and resulted in 0 ID switches. Beyond improving performance in handling occlusions and minimizing ID switches, our framework could substantially increase the time and cost efficiency compared to traditional manual annotation.