The rapid advances of transportation infrastructure have led to a dramatic increase in the demand for smart systems capable of monitoring traffic and street safety. Fundamental to these applications are a community-based evaluation platform and benchmark for object detection and multi-object tracking. To this end, we organize the AVSS2017 Challenge on Advanced Traffic Monitoring, in conjunction with the International Workshop on Traffic and Street Surveillance for Safety and Security (IWT4S), to evaluate the state-of-the-art object detection and multi-object tracking algorithms in the relevance of traffic surveillance. Submitted algorithms are evaluated using the large-scale UA-DETRAC benchmark and evaluation protocol. The benchmark, the evaluation toolkit and the algorithm performance are publicly available from the website http://detrac-db.rit.albany.edu.