# WaspMOT: A Benchmark for Long-Term Multi-Object Tracking of Trichogramma Wasps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08729/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [FastReID: A Pytorch Toolbox for General Instance Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02631/) (2020)
- [SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05170/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06918/) (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)
- [WildlifeDatasets: An open-source toolkit for animal re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09118/) (2023)
- [TOPIC: A Parallel Association Paradigm for Multi-Object Tracking under Complex Motions and Diverse Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11157/) (2023)
- [No Train Yet Gain: Towards Generic Multi-Object Tracking in Sports and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01373/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-object tracking (MOT) has achieved strong performance on benchmarks dominated by short video sequences. However, such datasets do not adequately evaluate long-term identity preservation, where objects must be tracked consistently over extended durations. We introduce WaspMOT, a benchmark designed to address this gap through long-duration tracking of Trichogramma wasps in controlled ecological experiments. The dataset contains 10 sequences of approximately 12,000 frames each (over 8 minutes at 25 FPS), with dense MOTChallenge annotations and oracle detections to isolate association performance. Unlike existing benchmarks, WaspMOT forms a closed-set tracking scenario where all individuals remain present throughout the sequence, requiring consistent identity assignment across thousands of frames despite abrupt jumps, occlusions, and highly similar appearance. We establish a benchmark by evaluating five tracking-by-detection methods, including ByteTrack, BoT-SORT, C-BIoU, OC-SORT, and McByte, under a unified protocol. Results show that all methods suffer from significant trajectory fragmentation, highlighting the difficulty of long-term identity preservation even with perfect detections. A simple spatial tracklet stitching baseline consistently improves performance, indicating that substantial gains remain possible. WaspMOT provides a new benchmark for studying long-term association and reveals limitations of current tracking approaches that are not observable on conventional datasets. The benchmark will be made publicly available at the project repository: https://github.com/tstanczyk95/WaspMOT/ .