multi-object tracking
2 (a) Visual Domain View (RGB) (b) Spectral Domain View (MSI)
Drone-based multi-object tracking is essential yet highly challenging due to small targets, severe occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds. Existing RGB-based multiobject tracking algorithms heavily depend on spatial appearance cues such as color and texture, which often degrade in aerial views, compromising tracking reliability. Multispectral imagery, capturing pixel-level spectral reflectance, provides crucial spectral cues that significantly enhance object discriminability under degraded spatial conditions. However, the lack of dedicated multispectral UAV datasets has hindered progress in this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMOT, the first challenging benchmark for drone-based multispectral multi-object tracking dataset. It features three key characteristics: (i) Large Scale -- 125 video sequences with over 488.8K annotations across eight object categories; (ii) Comprehensive Challenges -- covering diverse real-world challenges such as extreme small targets, high-density scenarios, severe occlusions, and complex platform motion; and (iii) Precise Oriented Annotations -- enabling accurate localization and reduced object ambiguity under aerial perspectives.
Dual-Path Temporal Decoder for End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking
We present a novel end-to-end transformer-based framework for Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) that advances temporal modeling and identity preservation. Despite recent progress in transformer-based MOT, existing methods still struggle to maintain consistent object identities across frames, especially under occlusions, appearance changes, or detection failures. We propose a dual-path temporal decoder that explicitly separates appearance adaptation and identity preservation. The appearance-adaptive decoder dynamically updates query features using current frame information, while the identity-preserving decoder freezes query features and reuses historical sampling offsets to maintain long-term temporal consistency. To further enhance stability, we introduce a confidence-guided update suppression strategy that retains previously reliable features when predictions are unreliable. Extensive experiments on MOT benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across major tracking metrics, with significant gains in association accuracy and identity consistency. Our results demonstrate the importance of decoupling dynamic appearance modeling from static identity cues, and provide a scalable foundation for robust tracking in complex scenarios.
SynCL: ASynergistic Training Strategy with Instance-Aware Contrastive Learning for End-to-End Multi-Camera 3DTracking
While existing query-based 3D end-to-end visual trackers integrate detection and tracking via the tracking-by-attention paradigm, these two chicken-and-egg tasks encounter optimization difficulties when sharing the same parameters. Our findings reveal that these difficulties arise due to two inherent constraints on the selfattention mechanism, i.e., over-deduplication for object queries and self-centric attention for track queries. In contrast, removing the self-attention mechanism not only minimally impacts regression predictions of the tracker, but also tends to generate more latent candidate boxes. Based on these analyses, we present SynCL, a novel plug-and-play synergistic training strategy designed to co-facilitate multi-task learning for detection and tracking. Specifically, we propose a Taskspecific Hybrid Matching module for a weight-shared cross-attention-based decoder that matches the targets of track queries with multiple object queries to exploit promising candidates overlooked by the self-attention mechanism and the bipartite matching. To flexibly select optimal candidates for the one-to-many matching, we also design a Dynamic Query Filtering module controlled by model training status. Moreover, we introduce Instance-aware Contrastive Learning to break through the barrier of self-centric attention for track queries, effectively bridging the gap between detection and tracking. Without additional inference costs, SynCL consistently delivers improvements in various benchmarks and achieves state-ofthe-art performance with 58.9% AMOTA on the nuScenes dataset.
muSSP: Efficient Min-cost Flow Algorithm for Multi-object Tracking
Min-cost flow has been a widely used paradigm for solving data association problems in multi-object tracking (MOT). However, most existing methods of solving min-cost flow problems in MOT are either direct adoption or slight modifications of generic min-cost flow algorithms, yielding sub-optimal computation efficiency and holding the applications back from larger scale of problems. In this paper, by exploiting the special structures and properties of the graphs formulated in MOT problems, we develop an efficient min-cost flow algorithm, namely, minimum-update Successive Shortest Path (muSSP).
AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios
Chen, Chenglizhao, Liang, Shaofeng, Guan, Runwei, Sun, Xiaolou, Zhao, Haocheng, Jiang, Haiyun, Huang, Tao, Ding, Henghui, Han, Qing-Long
Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to achieve precise object detection and tracking through natural language instructions, representing a fundamental capability for intelligent robotic systems. However, current RMOT research remains mostly confined to ground-level scenarios, which constrains their ability to capture broad-scale scene contexts and perform comprehensive tracking and path planning. In contrast, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) leverage their expansive aerial perspectives and superior maneuverability to enable wide-area surveillance. Moreover, UAVs have emerged as critical platforms for Embodied Intelligence, which has given rise to an unprecedented demand for intelligent aerial systems capable of natural language interaction. To this end, we introduce AerialMind, the first large-scale RMOT benchmark in UAV scenarios, which aims to bridge this research gap. To facilitate its construction, we develop an innovative semi-automated collaborative agent-based labeling assistant (COALA) framework that significantly reduces labor costs while maintaining annotation quality. Furthermore, we propose HawkEyeTrack (HETrack), a novel method that collaboratively enhances vision-language representation learning and improves the perception of UAV scenarios. Comprehensive experiments validated the challenging nature of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method.
StableTrack: Stabilizing Multi-Object Tracking on Low-Frequency Detections
Shelukhan, Matvei, Mamedov, Timur, Kvanchiani, Karina
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, where it is important to correctly detect objects and associate these detections across frames. Current approaches mainly focus on tracking objects in each frame of a video stream, making it almost impossible to run the model under conditions of limited computing resources. T o address this issue, we propose Stable-Track, a novel approach that stabilizes the quality of tracking on low-frequency detections. Our method introduces a new two-stage matching strategy to improve the cross-frame association between low-frequency detections. W e propose a novel Bbox-Based Distance instead of the conventional Mahalanobis distance, which allows us to effectively match objects using the Re-ID model. Furthermore, we integrate visual tracking into the Kalman Filter and the overall tracking pipeline. Our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers in the case of low-frequency detections, achieving 11.6% HOTA improvement at 1 Hz on MOT17-val, while keeping up with the best approaches on the standard MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack benchmarks with full-frequency detections.