Enhancing Multi Object Tracking with CLIP: A Comparative Study on DeepSORT and StrongSORT

Multi object tracking (MOT) is a crucial task in video analysis but is often hindered by frequent identity (ID) switches, particularly in crowded or occluded scenarios. This study explores the integration of a vision-language model, into two tracking by detection frameworks DeepSORT and StrongSORT to enhance appearance-based re-identification. YOLOv8x is employed as the base detector due to its robust localization performance, while CLIP’s visual features replace the default appearance encoders, providing more discriminative and semantically rich embeddings. We evaluated the CLIP enhanced DeepSORT and StrongSORT on sequences from two challenging real world benchmarks: MOT15 and MOT16. Furthermore, we analyze the generalizability of YOLOv8x when trained on the MOT20 benchmark and applied to the chosen trackers on MOT15 and MOT16. Our findings show that both CLIP enhanced trackers substantially reduce ID switches and improve ID-based tracking metrics, with CLIP StrongSORT achieving the most consistent gains. In addition, YOLOv8x demonstrates strong generalization capabilities for unseen datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating vision language models into MOT frameworks, particularly under visually challenging conditions.