The Problem
Multi-object tracking is essential for tasks like surveillance, sports analytics, and robotics, but it’s a pain to implement. Most tracking algorithms are buried in messy research codebases or tightly coupled with specific detection models. If you want to plug in custom detectors or experiment with different trackers, good luck—you’re in for a weekend of untangling spaghetti code.
What This Does
Enter trackers. It’s a Python library that gives you modular re-implementations of popular multi-object tracking algorithms like SORT and ByteTrack. Think of it as the clean, plug-and-play version of those research papers. The code is Apache 2.0 licensed, meaning you can actually use it in real-world projects without worrying about lawyers.
The key directories are trackers/core/, where the actual tracker implementations live, and trackers/eval/, which contains utilities for evaluating tracking performance. The trackers/scripts/ directory includes a CLI tool (trackers/scripts/track.py) for running basic tracking jobs directly from the terminal. Want to nerd out even more? The docs/ folder is packed with detailed guides and API documentation, plus a bunch of flashy SVG logos for your presentations.
Real-World Use
Say you’ve got a custom object detection model—maybe something lightweight like rfdetr-nano for edge devices. You can pair it with trackers to start tracking objects in a video feed within minutes. Here’s how simple it looks:
import cv2 from rfdetr import RFDETRNano from trackers import ByteTrackTracker
model = RFDETRNano() tracker = ByteTrackTracker()
cap = cv2.VideoCapture("video.mp4") while True: ret, frame = cap.read() if not ret: break detections = model.predict(frame) trackedobjects = tracker.update(detections) # Do something with trackedobjects, like drawing bounding boxes
If you don’t want to write code, the CLI tool has you covered. Run trackers track --source input.mp4 --output tracked.mp4 --model your-detector --tracker bytetrack to get tracked video output with minimal setup. No excuses—it doesn’t get easier than this.
The Bottom Line
trackers is a solid choice if you care about clean, modular code and need to mix-and-match detection models with tracking algorithms. It’s not for you if you need a ready-to-go, end-to-end solution (there’s no built-in detector). But if you’re building a custom pipeline or experimenting with tracking algorithms, this is the toolkit you want. It’s not perfect (more tracker support is "coming soon"™), but it’s already worth your time.