# BMCTrack-d: Pig re-identification and tracking via back marks in challenging camera settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03463 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03463/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [Deep OC-SORT: Multi-Pedestrian Tracking by Adaptive Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11813/) (2023)
- [Multiple Object Tracking as ID Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16848/) (2024)
- [Insights on back marking for the automated identification of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25535/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated pig monitoring is essential for assessing their health, behaviour, and welfare. To date, most pig monitoring solutions operate on the group-level, because individual-level monitoring requires reliable long-term identification and tracking of each animal. For domesticated pigs this remains challenging because pigs of the same breed often have highly uniform appearances. Moreover, research on pig monitoring is almost exclusively reported in top-down view camera settings, which considerably ease tracking, but are not always an option in practice. In this work, BMCTrack-d is presented, a novel tracking-by-detection approach that leverages unique back marks to enable robust pig re-identification and tracking in a challenging side-view camera setting, afflicted by rapidly moving pigs, severe occlusions and low resolution. The method first predicts the detected pigs' identities using a neural network-based back mark classifier. To improve re-identification reliability over time, two dedicated post-processing stages are introduced: a temporal prediction consistency check, which validates the identity assignments against the recent prediction history, and deduplication, which resolves conflicting identity assignments in each time step. By explicitly prioritising accurate, appearance-based re-identification over continuous tracking, the proposed approach addresses a key limitation of existing trackers for individual-level monitoring scenarios. On a demanding test set BMCTrack-d outperforms two strong baselines, BoT-SORT-ReID and TrackTrack-ReID, by 9.11% and 1.03%, respectively, in higher-order tracking accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of back mark-based re-identification and tracking for robust individual-level pig monitoring in challenging settings.