Multi-object tracking (MOT) can be considered as an interesting field in computer vision research. Its application can be found in video motion analysis, smart interfaces, and visual surveillance. It is a challenging issue due to difficulties made by a variable number of objects and interaction between them. In this work, a new method for online MOT based on time and frequency domain features is presented. The features are obtained from the wavelet transform and fractal dimension. The modified cuckoo optimization algorithm is utilized for feature selection, which has the ability such as fast convergence and global optima finding. The features are given for learning vector quantization, which is a supervised artificial neural network (ANN). It is used to classify the dataset. To evaluate the performance of the presented technique, simulations are performed using the ETH Mobile Platform and VS-PETS 2009 datasets. The simulation results show the superiority of the presented technique for MOT compared to earlier studies in terms of accuracy. The mostly tracked values for the datasets are 74.3% and 97.2%, which leads to at least 4.2% and 2.5% better performance according to the other methods, respectively. K E Y W O R D S fractal dimension, learning vector quantization, modified cuckoo optimization algorithm, multi-object tracking, time and frequency domain features, wavelet transform This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.