Implementation of custom bytetrack demo for real time stream analysis [GSoC'2026]

[Vishwa2684]

Mentors:
Adrian Tobiszewski @atobiszei
Darisuz Trawinski @dtrawins

🛠 Summary

This PR adds a ByteTrack Real-Time Stream Analysis demo for OpenVINO Model Server (OVMS) as part of the GSoC 2026 project, “Object Tracking in MediaPipe with OpenVINO Inference.”

The demo reuses the MediaPipe ByteTrack graph from demos/mediapipe/bytetrack with the yolox_tiny model and integrates it with the real_time_stream_analysis Python client. This enables object detection and multi-object tracking on RTSP streams using OVMS.

Current status: Moved the ByteTrack logic implemented in Phase 1 to this pull request. Wrote a script to download YOLOX-Tiny weights from OpenVINO on Hugging Face and generate the class text file required by the MediaPipe graph from the model configuration. Added calculators to process YOLOX-Tiny output tensors into detections. Completed the implementation of the ByteTrack logic.

Key Changes

• Moved the ByteTrack implementation from the MediaPipe OVMS fork into the Model Server repository:
  Implementation of custom bytetrack graph [GSoC'26] mediapipe#131
• Added a custom OVYoloXTensorsToDetectionsCalculator to process YOLOX output tensors from the YOLOX-Tiny model available on Hugging Face (OpenVINO/yolox_tiny-fp16-ov).

Directory Structure

Directory	Description
demos/mediapipe/bytetrack	MediaPipe ByteTrack OVMS demo and configuration
src/bytetrack	ByteTrack utilities and ByteTrack calculator
src/yolox	Utilities for processing YOLOX-Tiny output tensors and converting them into detections

What's Included

• A new MediaPipe ByteTrack demo in demos/mediapipe/bytetrack.
• Setup instructions covering model conversion, OVMS deployment, and RTSP streaming.
• A client.py example for running inference with:
  • Video input and output.
  • RTSP input and output streams.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR adds a new MediaPipe ByteTrack demo that integrates OVMS + the existing real-time stream analysis Python client to run object detection + multi-object tracking on RTSP streams. It also updates the MediaPipe build integration and adjusts streaming timestamp handling in the KFS graph executor.

Changes:

• Adds a new demos/mediapipe/bytetrack demo (graph, OVMS config, and setup README).
• Extends the real-time stream analysis Python demo CLI to pass FFmpeg output dimensions through to StreamClient.
• Updates MediaPipe/Bazel integration (new ByteTrack calculators dependency; changes MediaPipe git_repository source) and adds stricter timestamp monotonicity checks for streaming.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 7 out of 7 changed files in this pull request and generated 8 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
WORKSPACE	Switches the MediaPipe repository source (currently to a fork/branch).
third_party/mediapipe_calculators/BUILD	Adds ByteTrack calculators target to the OVMS MediaPipe calculators aggregation library.
src/kfs_frontend/kfs_graph_executor_impl.cpp	Changes timestamp deserialization/defaulting and adds stream-level monotonic timestamp enforcement.
demos/real_time_stream_analysis/python/client.py	Adds CLI args for FFmpeg output width/height and forwards them to StreamClient.
demos/mediapipe/bytetrack/README.md	Introduces demo setup/run instructions for ByteTrack RTSP streaming demo.
demos/mediapipe/bytetrack/config.json	Adds OVMS config for the YOLOX model + ByteTrack MediaPipe graph.
demos/mediapipe/bytetrack/bytetrack_ovms.pbtxt	Adds the MediaPipe graph wiring OpenVINO/OVMS inference + ByteTrack tracking + overlay.

Suppressed comments (1)

src/kfs_frontend/kfs_graph_executor_impl.cpp:1147

• The inline comment "// this method" is not descriptive. Either remove it or replace with a comment that explains what the function does.

// this method
Status createAndPushPacketsImpl(

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[dtrawins]

make sdl-check is failing with error:
No header files detected:
./demos/mediapipe/bytetrack/bytetrack_ovms.pbtxt
Could you add it to exception list in ci/lib_search.py

[Vishwa2684]

@atobiszei @dtrawins I've written code for custom calculator OVYoloXTensorsToDetections in src/yolox, and wrote a script to download OpenVINO/yolox_tiny-fp16-ov model weights and write class labels from the model config.

[Vishwa2684]

@dtrawins Why is the ci failing? Could you share the logs?