What are "Public Detections" (MOT)

The reason why MOTChallenge datasets frequently provide detections (often referred to as public detections, as opposed to the private detections, that are obtained by the algorithm authors by using a detector of their own) is that the detection quality has a big impact on the final performance of the tracker, but the detection part of the algorithms is often independent from the tracking part and usually uses already existing models; providing public detections that every model can use makes the comparison of the tracking algorithms easier, since the detection quality is factored out from the performance computation and trackers start on a common ground.