# Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking using YOLOv8 and SORT on a SoC FPGA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13023 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13023/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Quantizing deep convolutional networks for efficient inference: A whitepaper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08342/) (2018)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [Multiple Object Tracking: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7618/) (2014)
- [FINN: A Framework for Fast, Scalable Binarized Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07119/) (2016)
- [MOTChallenge 2015: Towards a Benchmark for Multi-Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01942/) (2015)
- [DAC-SDC Low Power Object Detection Challenge for UAV Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00110/) (2018)
- [Streamlined Deployment for Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04060/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is one of the most important problems in computer vision and a key component of any vision-based perception system used in advanced autonomous mobile robotics. Therefore, its implementation on low-power and real-time embedded platforms is highly desirable. Modern MOT algorithms should be able to track objects of a given class (e.g. people or vehicles). In addition, the number of objects to be tracked is not known in advance, and they may appear and disappear at any time, as well as be obscured. For these reasons, the most popular and successful approaches have recently been based on the tracking paradigm. Therefore, the presence of a high quality object detector is essential, which in practice accounts for the vast majority of the computational and memory complexity of the whole MOT system. In this paper, we propose an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) implementation of an embedded MOT system based on a quantized YOLOv8 detector and the SORT (Simple Online Realtime Tracker) tracker. We use a modified version of the FINN framework to utilize external memory for model parameters and to support operations necessary required by YOLOv8. We discuss the evaluation of detection and tracking performance using the COCO and MOT15 datasets, where we achieve 0.21 mAP and 38.9 MOTA respectively. As the computational platform, we use an MPSoC system (Zynq UltraScale+ device from AMD/Xilinx) where the detector is deployed in reprogrammable logic and the tracking algorithm is implemented in the processor system.