  Multi-object tracking (MOT) has profound applications in a variety of fields,
including surveillance, sports analytics, self-driving, and cooperative
robotics. Despite considerable advancements, existing MOT methodologies tend to
falter when faced with non-uniform movements, occlusions, and
appearance-reappearance scenarios of the objects. Recognizing this inadequacy,
we put forward an integrated MOT method that not only marries object detection
and identity linkage within a singular, end-to-end trainable framework but also
equips the model with the ability to maintain object identity links over long
periods of time. Our proposed model, named STMMOT, is built around four key
modules: 1) candidate proposal generation, which generates object proposals via
a vision-transformer encoder-decoder architecture that detects the object from
each frame in the video; 2) scale variant pyramid, a progressive pyramid
structure to learn the self-scale and cross-scale similarities in multi-scale
feature maps; 3) spatio-temporal memory encoder, extracting the essential
information from the memory associated with each object under tracking; and 4)
spatio-temporal memory decoder, simultaneously resolving the tasks of object
detection and identity association for MOT. Our system leverages a robust
spatio-temporal memory module that retains extensive historical observations
and effectively encodes them using an attention-based aggregator. The
uniqueness of STMMOT lies in representing objects as dynamic query embeddings
that are updated continuously, which enables the prediction of object states
with attention mechanisms and eradicates the need for post-processing.
