Transitioning from Amazon Rekognition people pathing: Exploring other alternatives

This article discusses transitioning from Amazon Rekognition's people pathing feature to alternative solutions, as AWS has decided to discontinue the people pathing capability on October 31, 2025.

Specifically, the article covers:

• An alternative solution combining the YOLOv9 object detection model and ByteTrack multi-object tracking algorithm
• Overview of how YOLOv9 and ByteTrack work for people tracking across video frames
• Example Python code for implementing this solution, with details on loading models, tracking, and output formatting
• Validating the solution with a sample video and JSON output
• Other open-source alternatives like DeepSORT and FairMOT
• Deploying these solutions using AWS services like Lambda and SageMaker