ByteTracker is a state-of-the-art multi-object tracking (MOT) system that achieves high performance by associating every detection box across video frames, including low-confidence ones. Instead of discarding uncertain detections, ByteTracker uses them to improve tracking accuracy, especially for occluded or partially visible objects.
The system works in a tracking-by-detection paradigm: an object detector first identifies objects in each frame, producing bounding boxes with confidence scores. ByteTracker then applies a two-phase association process. In the first phase, high-confidence detections are associated with existing tracks using motion prediction (Kalman filter) and appearance similarity (ReID features). In the second phase, low-confidence detections are associated with unconfirmed or lost tracks to recover missed objects.
This approach allows ByteTracker to maintain consistent tracks even during occlusions and achieves strong performance metrics, such as 80.3 MOTA and 77.3 IDF1 on the MOT17 benchmark while running at 30 FPS on a single GPU.
Summary
Functions
@spec new(TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.Settings.t()) :: reference()
Create a new ByteTracker instance.
Examples
iex> settings = %TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.Settings{track_thresh: 0.5, track_buffer: 30, match_thresh: 0.8, det_thresh: 0.6}
iex> byte_track = TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.new(settings)
iex> is_reference(byte_track) == true@spec update(reference(), [TrackForgex.Utils.Detection.t()]) :: [ TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.DetectionResult.t() ]
Update the ByteTracker instance with new detections.
Examples
iex> settings = %TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.Settings{track_thresh: 0.5, track_buffer: 30, match_thresh: 0.8, det_thresh: 0.6}
iex> byte_track = TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.new(settings)
iex> detections = [%TrackForgex.Utils.Detection{bbox: %TrackForgex.Utils.BBox{x: 0.0, y: 1.0, w: 0.0, h: 0.0}, score: 0.9, class_id: 0}]
iex> results = TrackForgex.Trackers.ByteTrack.update(byte_track, detections)
iex> results # list of DetectionResult structs