motcpp

Modern C++ Multi-Object Tracking — 10 SOTA algorithms, production-ready, 10–100× faster than Python

Features · Benchmarks · Installation · Quick Start · Trackers · Documentation · Citation

ByteTrack — 1100 FPS	OC-SORT — 850 FPS
BoostTrack — HOTA 67.5	SORT — 1250 FPS

motcpp is a high-performance C++ library for multi-object tracking (MOT). It implements 10 state-of-the-art algorithms with a unified, modern C++17 API — covering everything from the lightweight SORT baseline to the current BoostTrack SOTA — all ready to drop into production.

Inspired by BoxMOT, motcpp brings the same algorithmic breadth to C++ with a clean CMake integration, ONNX Runtime ReID backend, and built-in MOT benchmark tooling.

✨ Features

10 SOTA trackers — SORT, ByteTrack, OC-SORT, DeepOC-SORT, StrongSORT, BoT-SORT, BoostTrack, HybridSORT, UCMCTrack, OracleTrack
10–100× faster than Python — optimized C++ hot paths, zero-copy Eigen matrices
Unified API — one update(dets, img) call across all trackers
ONNX ReID backend — plug in any appearance model as an .onnx file
Camera motion compensation — ORB/ECC/SoF CMC built-in
MOT benchmark tooling — evaluate on MOT17/MOT20 out of the box
>90% test coverage — GoogleTest suite across all components
Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, Windows (CI-verified)
Modern CMake — find_package, FetchContent, and vcpkg ready

📊 Benchmarks

MOT17 Ablation Split

Evaluated on the second half of the MOT17 training set using YOLOX detections and FastReID embeddings. Pre-generated data available in releases. FPS on Intel i9-13900K, single thread.

Tracker	Type	HOTA ↑	MOTA ↑	IDF1 ↑	FPS ↑
SORT	Motion	62.4	75.2	69.2	1250
ByteTrack	Motion	66.5	76.4	77.6	1100
OC-SORT	Motion	64.6	73.9	74.4	850
UCMCTrack	Motion	64.0	75.6	73.9	980
OracleTrack	Motion	66.9	77.3	79.7	449
DeepOC-SORT	ReID	65.8	75.1	76.2	120
StrongSORT	ReID	66.2	75.8	77.1	95
BoT-SORT	ReID	66.8	76.2	78.3	85
HybridSORT	ReID	66.4	76.0	77.8	90
BoostTrack	ReID	67.5	77.1	79.2	75

C++ vs Python

Tracker	C++ (FPS)	Python (FPS)	Speedup
ByteTrack	1100	45	24×
OC-SORT	850	32	27×
StrongSORT	95	8	12×

🚀 Installation

Prerequisites

Dependency	Version	Required
C++ compiler (GCC / Clang / MSVC)	C++17	✅
CMake	3.20+	✅
OpenCV	4.x	✅
Eigen3	3.3+	✅
yaml-cpp	any	✅
ONNX Runtime	1.16+	ReID only

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y \
    build-essential cmake \
    libeigen3-dev libopencv-dev libyaml-cpp-dev

macOS

brew install cmake eigen opencv yaml-cpp

Windows (vcpkg)

vcpkg install eigen3:x64-windows opencv4:x64-windows yaml-cpp:x64-windows

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/Geekgineer/motcpp.git
cd motcpp
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
sudo cmake --install build

CMake `find_package`

find_package(motcpp REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(your_target PRIVATE motcpp::motcpp)

CMake `FetchContent`

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
    motcpp
    GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/Geekgineer/motcpp.git
    GIT_TAG        v1.0.0
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(motcpp)
target_link_libraries(your_target PRIVATE motcpp::motcpp)

Build Options

Option	Default	Description
`MOTCPP_BUILD_TESTS`	`ON`	GoogleTest unit tests
`MOTCPP_BUILD_EXAMPLES`	`ON`	Example binaries
`MOTCPP_BUILD_TOOLS`	`ON`	`motcpp_eval` CLI
`MOTCPP_ENABLE_ONNX`	`ON`	ONNX Runtime ReID backend
`MOTCPP_COVERAGE`	`OFF`	gcov/lcov coverage
`BUILD_SHARED_LIBS`	`OFF`	Build as shared library

🎮 Quick Start

Motion-Only Tracker (no ReID)

#include <motcpp/trackers/bytetrack.hpp>
#include <opencv2/opencv.hpp>

int main() {
    motcpp::trackers::ByteTrack tracker;

    cv::VideoCapture cap("video.mp4");
    cv::Mat frame;

    while (cap.read(frame)) {
        // Detector output: [x1, y1, x2, y2, confidence, class_id]
        Eigen::MatrixXf dets = your_detector(frame);

        // Update — returns [x1, y1, x2, y2, track_id, conf, class_id, det_idx]
        Eigen::MatrixXf tracks = tracker.update(dets, frame);

        for (int i = 0; i < tracks.rows(); ++i) {
            int id = static_cast<int>(tracks(i, 4));
            cv::Rect box(tracks(i, 0), tracks(i, 1),
                         tracks(i, 2) - tracks(i, 0),
                         tracks(i, 3) - tracks(i, 1));
            cv::rectangle(frame, box, motcpp::BaseTracker::id_to_color(id), 2);
            cv::putText(frame, "ID " + std::to_string(id),
                        box.tl(), cv::FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX, 0.6,
                        motcpp::BaseTracker::id_to_color(id), 2);
        }

        cv::imshow("Tracking", frame);
        if (cv::waitKey(1) == 27) break;
    }
}

ReID-Enhanced Tracker

#include <motcpp/trackers/boosttrack.hpp>

// Point to a ReID ONNX model (see docs/guides/trackers.md for download)
motcpp::trackers::BoostTrackTracker tracker("osnet_x1_0.onnx");

while (cap.read(frame)) {
    Eigen::MatrixXf dets  = detector(frame);
    Eigen::MatrixXf tracks = tracker.update(dets, frame);
    // ...
}

Per-Class Tracking

motcpp::trackers::ByteTrack tracker(
    0.3f,   // det_thresh
    30,     // max_age
    50,     // max_obs
    3,      // min_hits
    0.3f,   // iou_threshold
    true,   // per_class — track each class independently
    80      // nr_classes
);

Reset Between Sequences

tracker.reset();   // clears all track state and ID counter

📋 Trackers

Choosing the Right Tracker

Need maximum throughput (>500 FPS)?
    └─ SORT or ByteTrack

General purpose, great accuracy/speed balance?
    └─ ByteTrack · OC-SORT · OracleTrack

Heavy occlusion or non-linear motion?
    └─ OC-SORT · UCMCTrack · OracleTrack

Moving or drone camera?
    └─ UCMCTrack · BoT-SORT · OracleTrack

Have a ReID model and need best accuracy?
    └─ BoostTrack · StrongSORT · BoT-SORT

All Trackers at a Glance

Tracker	Type	State Space	Key Innovation	Paper
SORT	Motion	XYSR	IoU + Kalman baseline	ICASSP 2016
ByteTrack	Motion	XYAH	Two-stage low-conf association	ECCV 2022
OC-SORT	Motion	XYSR	Observation-centric momentum	CVPR 2023
UCMCTrack	Motion	Ground plane	Uniform camera motion compensation	AAAI 2024
OracleTrack	Motion	XYAH	CMC + cascaded matching + OC recovery	—
DeepOC-SORT	ReID	XYSR	OC-SORT + appearance embeddings	arXiv 2023
StrongSORT	ReID	XYAH	NSA Kalman + EMA appearance	TMM 2023
BoT-SORT	ReID	XYSR	GMC camera compensation + ReID	arXiv 2022
HybridSORT	ReID	XYSR	Hybrid IoU + height-modulated IoU	AAAI 2024
BoostTrack	ReID	XYSR	Boosted similarity + detection confidence	MVA 2024

Full parameter reference and per-tracker code snippets: docs/guides/trackers.md

ReID Model Download

# Download OSNet x1.0 (recommended — good accuracy/size balance)
./scripts/auto_benchmark.sh --download-reid

# Or directly:
wget https://github.com/Geekgineer/motcpp/releases/download/reid-models-v1.0.0/osnet_x1_0.onnx

🧪 Testing

cmake -B build -DMOTCPP_BUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
cd build && ctest --output-on-failure

# Single test suite
./build/tests/motcpp_tests --gtest_filter=ByteTrackTest.*

📚 Documentation

Resource	Description
Getting Started	Install, build, and run your first tracker
Tracker Guide	Full parameter docs for all 10 algorithms
Architecture	Kalman filters, association, ReID internals
Benchmarking	Reproduce MOT17/20 results
API Reference	Full C++ API
Tutorials	Step-by-step examples

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, new trackers, documentation, benchmarks. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the workflow.

📜 Citation

If you use motcpp in your research, please cite:

@software{motcpp2026,
  author  = {motcpp contributors},
  title   = {motcpp: Modern C++ Multi-Object Tracking Library},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/Geekgineer/motcpp},
  license = {AGPL-3.0}
}

Please also cite the original algorithm papers. See Acknowledgments below.

📄 License

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.

🙏 Acknowledgments

Tracking Algorithms

Algorithm	Reference
SORT	Bewley et al., Simple Online and Realtime Tracking, ICASSP 2016
ByteTrack	Zhang et al., ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box, ECCV 2022
OC-SORT	Cao et al., Observation-Centric SORT, CVPR 2023
DeepOC-SORT	Maggiolino et al., Deep OC-SORT, 2023
StrongSORT	Du et al., StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again, TMM 2023
BoT-SORT	Aharon et al., BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking, 2022
UCMCTrack	Yi et al., UCMCTrack: Multi-Object Tracking with Uniform Camera Motion Compensation, AAAI 2024
HybridSORT	Yang et al., Hybrid-SORT: Weak Cues Matter for Online Multi-Object Tracking, AAAI 2024
BoostTrack	Stanojevic et al., BoostTrack: Boosting the Similarity Measure and Detection Confidence, MVA 2024

Benchmark Tools

Resource	Citation
MOT17 Dataset	Milan et al., MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking, 2016
YOLOX Detections	Ge et al., YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021, 2021
FastReID Embeddings	He et al., FastReID: A Pytorch Toolbox for General Instance Re-identification, 2020

Inspiration

motcpp follows the architecture and algorithmic patterns of BoxMOT by Mikel Broström — the Python multi-object tracking library that inspired this C++ port.

Made with ❤️ by the motcpp community

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motcpp

✨ Features

📊 Benchmarks

MOT17 Ablation Split

C++ vs Python

🚀 Installation

Prerequisites

Build from Source

CMake `find_package`

CMake `FetchContent`

Build Options

🎮 Quick Start

Motion-Only Tracker (no ReID)

ReID-Enhanced Tracker

Per-Class Tracking

Reset Between Sequences

📋 Trackers

Choosing the Right Tracker

All Trackers at a Glance

ReID Model Download

🧪 Testing

📚 Documentation

🤝 Contributing

📜 Citation

📄 License

🙏 Acknowledgments

Tracking Algorithms

Benchmark Tools

Inspiration

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README.md

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README.md

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motcpp

✨ Features

📊 Benchmarks

MOT17 Ablation Split

C++ vs Python

🚀 Installation

Prerequisites

Build from Source

CMake find_package

CMake FetchContent

Build Options

🎮 Quick Start

Motion-Only Tracker (no ReID)

ReID-Enhanced Tracker

Per-Class Tracking

Reset Between Sequences

📋 Trackers

Choosing the Right Tracker

All Trackers at a Glance

ReID Model Download

🧪 Testing

📚 Documentation

🤝 Contributing

📜 Citation

📄 License

🙏 Acknowledgments

Tracking Algorithms

Benchmark Tools

Inspiration

CMake `find_package`

CMake `FetchContent`