SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes

Abstract

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in sports scenes plays a critical role in gathering players statistics, supporting further applications, such as automatic tactical analysis. Yet existing MOT benchmarks cast little attention on this domain. In this work, we present a new large-scale multi-object tracking dataset in multiple sports scenes, coined as SportsMOT, where all players on the court are supposed to be tracked. It consists of 240 video sequences, over 150K frames (almost 15x MOT17) and over 1.6M bounding boxes (3x MOT17) collected from 3 sports categories, including basketball, volleyball and football. Our dataset is characterized with two key properties: 1) fast and variable-speed motion and 2) similar yet distinguishable appearance. We expect SportsMOT to encourage the MOT trackers to promote in both motion-based association and appearance-based association. We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers and reveal the key challenge of SportsMOT lies in object association. To alleviate the issue, we further propose a new multi-object tracking framework, termed as MixSort, introducing a MixFormer-like structure as an auxiliary association model to prevailing tracking-by-detection trackers. By integrating the customized appearance-based association with the original motion-based association, MixSort achieves state-of-the-art performance on SportsMOT and MOT17. Based on MixSort, we give an in-depth analysis and provide some profound insights into SportsMOT.