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M3OT is a multi-modality vehicle detection and tracking dataset acquired by two Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a high-altitude region, consisting both RGB and infrared thermal (IR) modalities, ranging from 100\u2009m to 120\u2009m. Owing to the high-altitude acquisition, the annotated objects in the dataset are predominantly small objects, which poses significant challenges for detection and tracking algorithms. The dataset comprises 21,580 frames extracted from 8-hour videos, including 10,790 paired RGB-IR images, with a total of 220,000 bounding boxes annotated across various environments such as suburban, urban, daytime, dusk, and night. To our knowledge, this is the first multi-drone multi-modality dataset designed for multiple object tracking. We evaluate state-of-the-art multiple object tracking algorithms on this dataset. The experimental results indicate that the M3OT dataset presents a challenging benchmark for multiple object tracking. We believe that the M3OT dataset can contribute to applications and research based on vehicle detection and tracking from a UAV perspective. The dataset is freely available at\n                    <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xlink\" xlink:href=\"https:\/\/figshare.com\/s\/01fa8d1163f4e9a5a13a\" ext-link-type=\"uri\">https:\/\/figshare.com\/s\/01fa8d1163f4e9a5a13a<\/jats:ext-link>\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/s41597-025-06204-0","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,8]],"date-time":"2025-12-08T11:55:55Z","timestamp":1765194955000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["M3OT: A Multi-Drone Multi-Modality dataset for Multi-Object Tracking"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"12","author":[{"given":"Zhihao","family":"Nie","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Luyi","family":"Xue","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zhenyu","family":"Fang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jinchang","family":"Ren","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yufeng","family":"Wei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jiangbin","family":"Zheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"6204_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"48572","DOI":"10.1109\/access.2019.2909530","volume":"7","author":"H Shakhatreh","year":"2019","unstructured":"Shakhatreh, H. et al. 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