CO-MOT: Boosting End-to-end Transformer-based Multi-Object Tracking via Coopetition Label Assignment and Shadow Sets

Existing end-to-end Multi-Object Tracking (e2e-MOT) methods have not surpassed non-end-to-end tracking-by-detection methods. One possible reason lies in the training label assignment strategy that consistently binds the tracked objects with tracking queries and assigns few newborns to detection queries. Such an assignment, with one-to-one bipartite matching, yields an unbalanced training, i.e., scarce positive samples for detection queries, especially for an enclosed scene with the majority of the newborns at the beginning of videos. As such, e2e-MOT will incline to generate a tracking terminal without renewal or re-initialization, compared to other tracking-by-detection methods.To alleviate this problem, we propose Co-MOT, a simple yet effective method to facilitate e2e-MOT by a novel coopetition label assignment with a shadow concept. Specifically, we add tracked objects to the matching targets for detection queries when performing the label assignment for training the intermediate decoders. For query initialization, we expand each query by a set of shadow counterparts with limited disturbance to itself.With extensive ablation studies, Co-MOT achieves superior performances without extra costs, e.g., 69.4% HOTA on DanceTrack and 52.8% TETA on BDD100K. Impressively, Co-MOT only requires 38% FLOPs of MOTRv2 with comparable performances, resulting in the 1.4× faster inference speed. Source code is publicly available at GitHub.