Daily Papers

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in visual understanding but often lack reliable grounding capabilities and actionable inference rates. Integrating them with open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), instance segmentation, and tracking leverages their strengths while mitigating these drawbacks. We utilize VLM-generated structured descriptions to identify visible object instances, collect application-relevant attributes, and inform an open-vocabulary detector to extract corresponding bounding boxes that are passed to a video segmentation model providing segmentation masks and tracking. Once initialized, this model directly extracts segmentation masks, processing image streams in real time with minimal computational overhead. Tracks can be updated online as needed by generating new structured descriptions and detections. This combines the descriptive power of VLMs with the grounding capability of OVD and the pixel-level understanding and speed of video segmentation. Our evaluation across datasets and robotics platforms demonstrates the broad applicability of this approach, showcasing its ability to extract task-specific attributes from non-standard objects in dynamic environments. Code, data, videos, and benchmarks are available at https://vlm-gist.github.io

Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. A key issue is the difficulty in smoothly connecting individual entities in low-level observations with abstract concepts required for planning. A common approach to address this problem is through the use of hierarchical agents, where VLMs serve as high-level reasoners that break down tasks into executable sub-tasks, typically specified using language and imagined observations. However, language often fails to effectively convey spatial information, while generating future images with sufficient accuracy remains challenging. To address these limitations, we propose visual-temporal context prompting, a novel communication protocol between VLMs and policy models. This protocol leverages object segmentation from both past and present observations to guide policy-environment interactions. Using this approach, we train ROCKET-1, a low-level policy that predicts actions based on concatenated visual observations and segmentation masks, with real-time object tracking provided by SAM-2. Our method unlocks the full potential of VLMs visual-language reasoning abilities, enabling them to solve complex creative tasks, especially those heavily reliant on spatial understanding. Experiments in Minecraft demonstrate that our approach allows agents to accomplish previously unattainable tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of visual-temporal context prompting in embodied decision-making. Codes and demos will be available on the project page: https://craftjarvis.github.io/ROCKET-1.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) poses significant challenges in computer vision. Despite its wide application in robotics, autonomous driving, and smart manufacturing, there is limited literature addressing the specific challenges of running MOT on embedded devices. State-of-the-art MOT trackers designed for high-end GPUs often experience low processing rates (<11fps) when deployed on embedded devices. Existing MOT frameworks for embedded devices proposed strategies such as fusing the detector model with the feature embedding model to reduce inference latency or combining different trackers to improve tracking accuracy, but tend to compromise one for the other. This paper introduces HopTrack, a real-time multi-object tracking system tailored for embedded devices. Our system employs a novel discretized static and dynamic matching approach along with an innovative content-aware dynamic sampling technique to enhance tracking accuracy while meeting the real-time requirement. Compared with the best high-end GPU modified baseline Byte (Embed) and the best existing baseline on embedded devices MobileNet-JDE, HopTrack achieves a processing speed of up to 39.29 fps on NVIDIA AGX Xavier with a multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of up to 63.12% on the MOT16 benchmark, outperforming both counterparts by 2.15% and 4.82%, respectively. Additionally, the accuracy improvement is coupled with the reduction in energy consumption (20.8%), power (5%), and memory usage (8%), which are crucial resources on embedded devices. HopTrack is also detector agnostic allowing the flexibility of plug-and-play.

Regulatory compliance auditing across diverse industrial domains requires heightened quality assurance and traceability. Present manual and intermittent approaches to such auditing yield significant challenges, potentially leading to oversights in the monitoring process. To address these issues, we introduce a real-time, multi-modal sensing system employing 3D time-of-flight and RGB cameras, coupled with unsupervised learning techniques on edge AI devices. This enables continuous object tracking thereby enhancing efficiency in record-keeping and minimizing manual interventions. While we validate the system in a knife sanitization context within agrifood facilities, emphasizing its prowess against occlusion and low-light issues with RGB cameras, its potential spans various industrial monitoring settings.

Siamese network has been a de facto benchmark framework for 3D LiDAR object tracking with a shared-parametric encoder extracting features from template and search region, respectively. This paradigm relies heavily on an additional matching network to model the cross-correlation/similarity of the template and search region. In this paper, we forsake the conventional Siamese paradigm and propose a novel single-branch framework, SyncTrack, synchronizing the feature extracting and matching to avoid forwarding encoder twice for template and search region as well as introducing extra parameters of matching network. The synchronization mechanism is based on the dynamic affinity of the Transformer, and an in-depth analysis of the relevance is provided theoretically. Moreover, based on the synchronization, we introduce a novel Attentive Points-Sampling strategy into the Transformer layers (APST), replacing the random/Farthest Points Sampling (FPS) method with sampling under the supervision of attentive relations between the template and search region. It implies connecting point-wise sampling with the feature learning, beneficial to aggregating more distinctive and geometric features for tracking with sparse points. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (KITTI and NuScenes) show that SyncTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance in real-time tracking.

Conventional multi-object tracking (MOT) systems are predominantly designed for pedestrian tracking and often exhibit limited generalization to other object categories. This paper presents a generalized tracking framework capable of handling multiple object types, with a particular emphasis on vehicle tracking in complex traffic scenes. The proposed method incorporates two key components: (1) an occlusion-aware re-identification mechanism that enhances identity preservation for heavily occluded objects, and (2) a road-structure-aware tracklet refinement strategy that utilizes semantic scene priors such as lane directions, crosswalks, and road boundaries to improve trajectory continuity and accuracy. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark dataset comprising diverse vehicle classes with frame-level tracking annotations, specifically curated to support evaluation of vehicle-focused tracking methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves robust performance on both the newly introduced dataset and several public benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in general-purpose object tracking. While our framework is designed for generalized multi-class tracking, it also achieves strong performance on conventional benchmarks, with HOTA scores of 66.4 on MOT17 and 65.7 on MOT20 test sets. Code and Benchmark are available: github.com/Hamidreza-Hashempoor/FastTracker, huggingface.co/datasets/Hamidreza-Hashemp/FastTracker-Benchmark.

Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is a crucial component in various applications, including localization and mapping in robotics, object tracking, and activity recognition in computer vision. While recent learning-based optical flow methods have achieved high accuracy, they often come with heavy computation costs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient optical flow architecture, called NeuFlow, that addresses both high accuracy and computational cost concerns. The architecture follows a global-to-local scheme. Given the features of the input images extracted at different spatial resolutions, global matching is employed to estimate an initial optical flow on the 1/16 resolution, capturing large displacement, which is then refined on the 1/8 resolution with lightweight CNN layers for better accuracy. We evaluate our approach on Jetson Orin Nano and RTX 2080 to demonstrate efficiency improvements across different computing platforms. We achieve a notable 10x-80x speedup compared to several state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our approach achieves around 30 FPS on edge computing platforms, which represents a significant breakthrough in deploying complex computer vision tasks such as SLAM on small robots like drones. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow.

This paper introduces SFSORT, the world's fastest multi-object tracking system based on experiments conducted on MOT Challenge datasets. To achieve an accurate and computationally efficient tracker, this paper employs a tracking-by-detection method, following the online real-time tracking approach established in prior literature. By introducing a novel cost function called the Bounding Box Similarity Index, this work eliminates the Kalman Filter, leading to reduced computational requirements. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the impact of scene features on enhancing object-track association and improving track post-processing. Using a 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon CPU, the proposed method achieves an HOTA of 61.7\% with a processing speed of 2242 Hz on the MOT17 dataset and an HOTA of 60.9\% with a processing speed of 304 Hz on the MOT20 dataset. The tracker's source code, fine-tuned object detection model, and tutorials are available at https://github.com/gitmehrdad/SFSORT.

Recent advances in medical image segmentation have been driven by deep learning; however, most existing methods remain limited by modality-specific designs and exhibit poor adaptability to dynamic medical imaging scenarios. The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) and its related variants, which introduce a streaming memory mechanism for real-time video segmentation, present new opportunities for prompt-based, generalizable solutions. Nevertheless, adapting these models to medical video scenarios typically requires large-scale datasets for retraining or transfer learning, leading to high computational costs and the risk of catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose DD-SAM2, an efficient adaptation framework for SAM2 that incorporates a Depthwise-Dilated Adapter (DD-Adapter) to enhance multi-scale feature extraction with minimal parameter overhead. This design enables effective fine-tuning of SAM2 on medical videos with limited training data. Unlike existing adapter-based methods focused solely on static images, DD-SAM2 fully exploits SAM2's streaming memory for medical video object tracking and segmentation. Comprehensive evaluations on TrackRad2025 (tumor segmentation) and EchoNet-Dynamic (left ventricle tracking) datasets demonstrate superior performance, achieving Dice scores of 0.93 and 0.97, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides an initial attempt at systematically exploring adapter-based SAM2 fine-tuning for medical video segmentation and tracking. Code, datasets, and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/apple1986/DD-SAM2.

We present CompactFlowNet, the first real-time mobile neural network for optical flow prediction, which involves determining the displacement of each pixel in an initial frame relative to the corresponding pixel in a subsequent frame. Optical flow serves as a fundamental building block for various video-related tasks, such as video restoration, motion estimation, video stabilization, object tracking, action recognition, and video generation. While current state-of-the-art methods prioritize accuracy, they often overlook constraints regarding speed and memory usage. Existing light models typically focus on reducing size but still exhibit high latency, compromise significantly on quality, or are optimized for high-performance GPUs, resulting in sub-optimal performance on mobile devices. This study aims to develop a mobile-optimized optical flow model by proposing a novel mobile device-compatible architecture, as well as enhancements to the training pipeline, which optimize the model for reduced weight, low memory utilization, and increased speed while maintaining minimal error. Our approach demonstrates superior or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art lightweight models on the challenging KITTI and Sintel benchmarks. Furthermore, it attains a significantly accelerated inference speed, thereby yielding real-time operational efficiency on the iPhone 8, while surpassing real-time performance levels on more advanced mobile devices.

In existing joint detection and tracking methods, pairwise relational features are used to match previous tracklets to current detections. However, the features may not be discriminative enough for a tracker to identify a target from a large number of detections. Selecting only high-scored detections for tracking may lead to missed detections whose confidence score is low. Consequently, in the online setting, this results in disconnections of tracklets which cannot be recovered. In this regard, we present Sparse Graph Tracker (SGT), a novel online graph tracker using higher-order relational features which are more discriminative by aggregating the features of neighboring detections and their relations. SGT converts video data into a graph where detections, their connections, and the relational features of two connected nodes are represented by nodes, edges, and edge features, respectively. The strong edge features allow SGT to track targets with tracking candidates selected by top-K scored detections with large K. As a result, even low-scored detections can be tracked, and the missed detections are also recovered. The robustness of K value is shown through the extensive experiments. In the MOT16/17/20 and HiEve Challenge, SGT outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers with real-time inference speed. Especially, a large improvement in MOTA is shown in the MOT20 and HiEve Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/HYUNJS/SGT.

Kalman filter (KF) based methods for multi-object tracking (MOT) make an assumption that objects move linearly. While this assumption is acceptable for very short periods of occlusion, linear estimates of motion for prolonged time can be highly inaccurate. Moreover, when there is no measurement available to update Kalman filter parameters, the standard convention is to trust the priori state estimations for posteriori update. This leads to the accumulation of errors during a period of occlusion. The error causes significant motion direction variance in practice. In this work, we show that a basic Kalman filter can still obtain state-of-the-art tracking performance if proper care is taken to fix the noise accumulated during occlusion. Instead of relying only on the linear state estimate (i.e., estimation-centric approach), we use object observations (i.e., the measurements by object detector) to compute a virtual trajectory over the occlusion period to fix the error accumulation of filter parameters during the occlusion period. This allows more time steps to correct errors accumulated during occlusion. We name our method Observation-Centric SORT (OC-SORT). It remains Simple, Online, and Real-Time but improves robustness during occlusion and non-linear motion. Given off-the-shelf detections as input, OC-SORT runs at 700+ FPS on a single CPU. It achieves state-of-the-art on multiple datasets, including MOT17, MOT20, KITTI, head tracking, and especially DanceTrack where the object motion is highly non-linear. The code and models are available at https://github.com/noahcao/OC_SORT.

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has demonstrated strong performance in object segmentation tasks but faces challenges in visual object tracking, particularly when managing crowded scenes with fast-moving or self-occluding objects. Furthermore, the fixed-window memory approach in the original model does not consider the quality of memories selected to condition the image features for the next frame, leading to error propagation in videos. This paper introduces SAMURAI, an enhanced adaptation of SAM 2 specifically designed for visual object tracking. By incorporating temporal motion cues with the proposed motion-aware memory selection mechanism, SAMURAI effectively predicts object motion and refines mask selection, achieving robust, accurate tracking without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. SAMURAI operates in real-time and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance across diverse benchmark datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize without fine-tuning. In evaluations, SAMURAI achieves significant improvements in success rate and precision over existing trackers, with a 7.1% AUC gain on LaSOT_{ext} and a 3.5% AO gain on GOT-10k. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods on LaSOT, underscoring its robustness in complex tracking scenarios and its potential for real-world applications in dynamic environments. Code and results are available at https://github.com/yangchris11/samurai.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for explicit 3D scene representation, yet achieving efficient and consistent 3D segmentation remains challenging. Current methods suffer from prohibitive computational costs, limited 3D spatial reasoning, and an inability to track multiple objects simultaneously. We present Segment Any Gaussians Online (SAGOnline), a lightweight and zero-shot framework for real-time 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) a decoupled strategy that integrates video foundation models (e.g., SAM2) for view-consistent 2D mask propagation across synthesized views; and (2) a GPU-accelerated 3D mask generation and Gaussian-level instance labeling algorithm that assigns unique identifiers to 3D primitives, enabling lossless multi-object tracking and segmentation across views. SAGOnline achieves state-of-the-art performance on NVOS (92.7% mIoU) and Spin-NeRF (95.2% mIoU) benchmarks, outperforming Feature3DGS, OmniSeg3D-gs, and SA3D by 15--1500 times in inference speed (27 ms/frame). Qualitative results demonstrate robust multi-object segmentation and tracking in complex scenes. Our contributions include: (i) a lightweight and zero-shot framework for 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes, (ii) explicit labeling of Gaussian primitives enabling simultaneous segmentation and tracking, and (iii) the effective adaptation of 2D video foundation models to the 3D domain. This work allows real-time rendering and 3D scene understanding, paving the way for practical AR/VR and robotic applications.

Efficient and accurate object pose estimation is an essential component for modern vision systems in many applications such as Augmented Reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While research in model-based 6D object pose estimation has delivered promising results, model-free methods are hindered by the high computational load in rendering and inferring consistent poses of arbitrary objects in a live RGB-D video stream. To address this issue, we present 6DOPE-GS, a novel method for online 6D object pose estimation \& tracking with a single RGB-D camera by effectively leveraging advances in Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to the fast differentiable rendering capabilities of Gaussian Splatting, 6DOPE-GS can simultaneously optimize for 6D object poses and 3D object reconstruction. To achieve the necessary efficiency and accuracy for live tracking, our method uses incremental 2D Gaussian Splatting with an intelligent dynamic keyframe selection procedure to achieve high spatial object coverage and prevent erroneous pose updates. We also propose an opacity statistic-based pruning mechanism for adaptive Gaussian density control, to ensure training stability and efficiency. We evaluate our method on the HO3D and YCBInEOAT datasets and show that 6DOPE-GS matches the performance of state-of-the-art baselines for model-free simultaneous 6D pose tracking and reconstruction while providing a 5times speedup. We also demonstrate the method's suitability for live, dynamic object tracking and reconstruction in a real-world setting.

In this paper, we propose a lightweight system, RDS-SLAM, based on ORB-SLAM2, which can accurately estimate poses and build semantic maps at object level for dynamic scenarios in real time using only one commonly used Intel Core i7 CPU. In RDS-SLAM, three major improvements, as well as major architectural modifications, are proposed to overcome the limitations of ORB-SLAM2. Firstly, it adopts a lightweight object detection neural network in key frames. Secondly, an efficient tracking and prediction mechanism is embedded into the system to remove the feature points belonging to movable objects in all incoming frames. Thirdly, a semantic octree map is built by probabilistic fusion of detection and tracking results, which enables a robot to maintain a semantic description at object level for potential interactions in dynamic scenarios. We evaluate RDS-SLAM in TUM RGB-D dataset, and experimental results show that RDS-SLAM can run with 30.3 ms per frame in dynamic scenarios using only an Intel Core i7 CPU, and achieves comparable accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art SLAM systems which heavily rely on both Intel Core i7 CPUs and powerful GPUs.

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

We present a near real-time method for 6-DoF tracking of an unknown object from a monocular RGBD video sequence, while simultaneously performing neural 3D reconstruction of the object. Our method works for arbitrary rigid objects, even when visual texture is largely absent. The object is assumed to be segmented in the first frame only. No additional information is required, and no assumption is made about the interaction agent. Key to our method is a Neural Object Field that is learned concurrently with a pose graph optimization process in order to robustly accumulate information into a consistent 3D representation capturing both geometry and appearance. A dynamic pool of posed memory frames is automatically maintained to facilitate communication between these threads. Our approach handles challenging sequences with large pose changes, partial and full occlusion, untextured surfaces, and specular highlights. We show results on HO3D, YCBInEOAT, and BEHAVE datasets, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. Project page: https://bundlesdf.github.io

Recent advances in imitation learning for 3D robotic manipulation have shown promising results with diffusion-based policies. However, achieving human-level dexterity requires seamless integration of geometric precision and semantic understanding. We present G3Flow, a novel framework that constructs real-time semantic flow, a dynamic, object-centric 3D semantic representation by leveraging foundation models. Our approach uniquely combines 3D generative models for digital twin creation, vision foundation models for semantic feature extraction, and robust pose tracking for continuous semantic flow updates. This integration enables complete semantic understanding even under occlusions while eliminating manual annotation requirements. By incorporating semantic flow into diffusion policies, we demonstrate significant improvements in both terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization. Extensive experiments across five simulation tasks show that G3Flow consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to 68.3% and 50.1% average success rates on terminal-constrained manipulation and cross-object generalization tasks respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of G3Flow in enhancing real-time dynamic semantic feature understanding for robotic manipulation policies.

Surgical video segmentation is crucial for computer-assisted surgery, enabling precise localization and tracking of instruments and tissues. Interactive Video Object Segmentation (iVOS) models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) provide prompt-based flexibility beyond methods with predefined categories, but face challenges in surgical scenarios due to the domain gap and limited long-term tracking. To address these limitations, we construct SA-SV, the largest surgical iVOS benchmark with instance-level spatio-temporal annotations (masklets) spanning eight procedure types (61k frames, 1.6k masklets), enabling comprehensive development and evaluation for long-term tracking and zero-shot generalization. Building on SA-SV, we propose SAM2S, a foundation model enhancing SAM2 for Surgical iVOS through: (1) DiveMem, a trainable diverse memory mechanism for robust long-term tracking; (2) temporal semantic learning for instrument understanding; and (3) ambiguity-resilient learning to mitigate annotation inconsistencies across multi-source datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning on SA-SV enables substantial performance gains, with SAM2 improving by 12.99 average J\&F over vanilla SAM2. SAM2S further advances performance to 80.42 average J\&F, surpassing vanilla and fine-tuned SAM2 by 17.10 and 4.11 points respectively, while maintaining 68 FPS real-time inference and strong zero-shot generalization. Code and dataset will be released at https://jinlab-imvr.github.io/SAM2S.

This paper addresses the task of modeling Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), such as ropes and cables, during dynamic motion over long time horizons. This task presents significant challenges due to the complex dynamics of DLOs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes differentiable Discrete Elastic Rods For deformable linear Objects with Real-time Modeling (DEFORM), a novel framework that combines a differentiable physics-based model with a learning framework to model DLOs accurately and in real-time. The performance of DEFORM is evaluated in an experimental setup involving two industrial robots and a variety of sensors. A comprehensive series of experiments demonstrate the efficacy of DEFORM in terms of accuracy, computational speed, and generalizability when compared to state-of-the-art alternatives. To further demonstrate the utility of DEFORM, this paper integrates it into a perception pipeline and illustrates its superior performance when compared to the state-of-the-art methods while tracking a DLO even in the presence of occlusions. Finally, this paper illustrates the superior performance of DEFORM when compared to state-of-the-art methods when it is applied to perform autonomous planning and control of DLOs. Project page: https://roahmlab.github.io/DEFORM/.

Humanoid teleoperation plays a vital role in demonstrating and collecting data for complex humanoid-scene interactions. However, current teleoperation systems face critical limitations: they decouple upper- and lower-body control to maintain stability, restricting natural coordination, and operate open-loop without real-time position feedback, leading to accumulated drift. The fundamental challenge is achieving precise, coordinated whole-body teleoperation over extended durations while maintaining accurate global positioning. Here we show that an MoE-based teleoperation system, CLONE, with closed-loop error correction enables unprecedented whole-body teleoperation fidelity, maintaining minimal positional drift over long-range trajectories using only head and hand tracking from an MR headset. Unlike previous methods that either sacrifice coordination for stability or suffer from unbounded drift, CLONE learns diverse motion skills while preventing tracking error accumulation through real-time feedback, enabling complex coordinated movements such as ``picking up objects from the ground.'' These results establish a new milestone for whole-body humanoid teleoperation for long-horizon humanoid-scene interaction tasks.

This paper explores a pragmatic approach to multiple object tracking where the main focus is to associate objects efficiently for online and realtime applications. To this end, detection quality is identified as a key factor influencing tracking performance, where changing the detector can improve tracking by up to 18.9%. Despite only using a rudimentary combination of familiar techniques such as the Kalman Filter and Hungarian algorithm for the tracking components, this approach achieves an accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art online trackers. Furthermore, due to the simplicity of our tracking method, the tracker updates at a rate of 260 Hz which is over 20x faster than other state-of-the-art trackers.

Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) is a pragmatic approach to multiple object tracking with a focus on simple, effective algorithms. In this paper, we integrate appearance information to improve the performance of SORT. Due to this extension we are able to track objects through longer periods of occlusions, effectively reducing the number of identity switches. In spirit of the original framework we place much of the computational complexity into an offline pre-training stage where we learn a deep association metric on a large-scale person re-identification dataset. During online application, we establish measurement-to-track associations using nearest neighbor queries in visual appearance space. Experimental evaluation shows that our extensions reduce the number of identity switches by 45%, achieving overall competitive performance at high frame rates.

Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extract local image patches from it and each local patch is encoded with respect to the dictionary. The encoded features are then pooled over a spatial pyramid to form an aggregated feature vector. Finally, a simple linear classifier is trained on these features. Our experiments show that the proposed powerful---albeit simple---tracker, outperforms all the state-of-the-art tracking methods that we have tested. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of different dictionary learning and feature encoding methods in the proposed tracking framework, and analyse the impact of each component in the tracking scenario. We also demonstrate the flexibility of feature learning by plugging it into Hare et al.'s tracking method. The outcome is, to our knowledge, the best tracker ever reported, which facilitates the advantages of both feature learning and structured output prediction.

Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking (MC-MOT) utilizes information from multiple views to better handle problems with occlusion and crowded scenes. Recently, the use of graph-based approaches to solve tracking problems has become very popular. However, many current graph-based methods do not effectively utilize information regarding spatial and temporal consistency. Instead, they rely on single-camera trackers as input, which are prone to fragmentation and ID switch errors. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable graph model that first associates all detected objects across cameras spatially before reconfiguring it into a temporal graph for Temporal Association. This two-stage association approach enables us to extract robust spatial and temporal-aware features and address the problem with fragmented tracklets. Furthermore, our model is designed for online tracking, making it suitable for real-world applications. Experimental results show that the proposed graph model is able to extract more discriminating features for object tracking, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

Despite great recent advances in visual tracking, its further development, including both algorithm design and evaluation, is limited due to lack of dedicated large-scale benchmarks. To address this problem, we present LaSOT, a high-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking benchmark. LaSOT contains a diverse selection of 85 object classes, and offers 1,550 totaling more than 3.87 million frames. Each video frame is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box. This makes LaSOT, to our knowledge, the largest densely annotated tracking benchmark. Our goal in releasing LaSOT is to provide a dedicated high quality platform for both training and evaluation of trackers. The average video length of LaSOT is around 2,500 frames, where each video contains various challenge factors that exist in real world video footage,such as the targets disappearing and re-appearing. These longer video lengths allow for the assessment of long-term trackers. To take advantage of the close connection between visual appearance and natural language, we provide language specification for each video in LaSOT. We believe such additions will allow for future research to use linguistic features to improve tracking. Two protocols, full-overlap and one-shot, are designated for flexible assessment of trackers. We extensively evaluate 48 baseline trackers on LaSOT with in-depth analysis, and results reveal that there still exists significant room for improvement. The complete benchmark, tracking results as well as analysis are available at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~lasot/.

Tracking objects with persistence in cluttered and dynamic environments remains a difficult challenge for computer vision systems. In this paper, we introduce TCOW, a new benchmark and model for visual tracking through heavy occlusion and containment. We set up a task where the goal is to, given a video sequence, segment both the projected extent of the target object, as well as the surrounding container or occluder whenever one exists. To study this task, we create a mixture of synthetic and annotated real datasets to support both supervised learning and structured evaluation of model performance under various forms of task variation, such as moving or nested containment. We evaluate two recent transformer-based video models and find that while they can be surprisingly capable of tracking targets under certain settings of task variation, there remains a considerable performance gap before we can claim a tracking model to have acquired a true notion of object permanence.

RGB video object tracking is a fundamental task in computer vision. Its effectiveness can be improved using depth information, particularly for handling motion-blurred target. However, depth information is often missing in commonly used tracking benchmarks. In this work, we propose a new framework that leverages monocular depth estimation to counter the challenges of tracking targets that are out of view or affected by motion blur in RGB video sequences. Specifically, our work introduces following contributions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a depth attention mechanism and to formulate a simple framework that allows seamlessly integration of depth information with state of the art tracking algorithms, without RGB-D cameras, elevating accuracy and robustness. We provide extensive experiments on six challenging tracking benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that our approach provides consistent gains over several strong baselines and achieves new SOTA performance. We believe that our method will open up new possibilities for more sophisticated VOT solutions in real-world scenarios. Our code and models are publicly released: https://github.com/LiuYuML/Depth-Attention.

Visual object tracking is a fundamental video task in computer vision. Recently, the notably increasing power of perception algorithms allows the unification of single/multiobject and box/mask-based tracking. Among them, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) attracts much attention. In this report, we propose HQTrack, a framework for High Quality Tracking anything in videos. HQTrack mainly consists of a video multi-object segmenter (VMOS) and a mask refiner (MR). Given the object to be tracked in the initial frame of a video, VMOS propagates the object masks to the current frame. The mask results at this stage are not accurate enough since VMOS is trained on several closeset video object segmentation (VOS) datasets, which has limited ability to generalize to complex and corner scenes. To further improve the quality of tracking masks, a pretrained MR model is employed to refine the tracking results. As a compelling testament to the effectiveness of our paradigm, without employing any tricks such as test-time data augmentations and model ensemble, HQTrack ranks the 2nd place in the Visual Object Tracking and Segmentation (VOTS2023) challenge. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/HQTrack.

Visual object tracking plays a critical role in visual-based autonomous systems, as it aims to estimate the position and size of the object of interest within a live video. Despite significant progress made in this field, state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers often fail when faced with adversarial perturbations in the incoming frames. This can lead to significant robustness and security issues when these trackers are deployed in the real world. To achieve high accuracy on both clean and adversarial data, we propose building a spatial-temporal continuous representation using the semantic text guidance of the object of interest. This novel continuous representation enables us to reconstruct incoming frames to maintain semantic and appearance consistency with the object of interest and its clean counterparts. As a result, our proposed method successfully defends against different SOTA adversarial tracking attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean data. In particular, our method significantly increases tracking accuracy under adversarial attacks with around 90% relative improvement on UAV123, which is even higher than the accuracy on clean data.

In this paper, we present LaSOT, a high-quality benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking. LaSOT consists of 1,400 sequences with more than 3.5M frames in total. Each frame in these sequences is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box, making LaSOT the largest, to the best of our knowledge, densely annotated tracking benchmark. The average video length of LaSOT is more than 2,500 frames, and each sequence comprises various challenges deriving from the wild where target objects may disappear and re-appear again in the view. By releasing LaSOT, we expect to provide the community with a large-scale dedicated benchmark with high quality for both the training of deep trackers and the veritable evaluation of tracking algorithms. Moreover, considering the close connections of visual appearance and natural language, we enrich LaSOT by providing additional language specification, aiming at encouraging the exploration of natural linguistic feature for tracking. A thorough experimental evaluation of 35 tracking algorithms on LaSOT is presented with detailed analysis, and the results demonstrate that there is still a big room for improvements.

Recent advances of monocular 3D object detection facilitate the 3D multi-object tracking task based on low-cost camera sensors. In this paper, we find that the motion cue of objects along different time frames is critical in 3D multi-object tracking, which is less explored in existing monocular-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a motion-aware framework for monocular 3D MOT. To this end, we propose MoMA-M3T, a framework that mainly consists of three motion-aware components. First, we represent the possible movement of an object related to all object tracklets in the feature space as its motion features. Then, we further model the historical object tracklet along the time frame in a spatial-temporal perspective via a motion transformer. Finally, we propose a motion-aware matching module to associate historical object tracklets and current observations as final tracking results. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets to demonstrate that our MoMA-M3T achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed tracker is flexible and can be easily plugged into existing image-based 3D object detectors without re-training. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/MoMA-M3T.

Many Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approaches exploit motion information to associate all the detected objects across frames. However, many methods that rely on filtering-based algorithms, such as the Kalman Filter, often work well in linear motion scenarios but struggle to accurately predict the locations of objects undergoing complex and non-linear movements. To tackle these scenarios, we propose a motion-based MOT approach with an enhanced temporal motion predictor, ETTrack. Specifically, the motion predictor integrates a transformer model and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to capture short-term and long-term motion patterns, and it predicts the future motion of individual objects based on the historical motion information. Additionally, we propose a novel Momentum Correction Loss function that provides additional information regarding the motion direction of objects during training. This allows the motion predictor rapidly adapt to motion variations and more accurately predict future motion. Our experimental results demonstrate that ETTrack achieves a competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art trackers on DanceTrack and SportsMOT, scoring 56.4% and 74.4% in HOTA metrics, respectively.

In this paper, we propose a simple and strong framework for Tracking Any Point with TRansformers (TAPTR). Based on the observation that point tracking bears a great resemblance to object detection and tracking, we borrow designs from DETR-like algorithms to address the task of TAP. In the proposed framework, in each video frame, each tracking point is represented as a point query, which consists of a positional part and a content part. As in DETR, each query (its position and content feature) is naturally updated layer by layer. Its visibility is predicted by its updated content feature. Queries belonging to the same tracking point can exchange information through self-attention along the temporal dimension. As all such operations are well-designed in DETR-like algorithms, the model is conceptually very simple. We also adopt some useful designs such as cost volume from optical flow models and develop simple designs to provide long temporal information while mitigating the feature drifting issue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance with state-of-the-art performance on various TAP datasets with faster inference speed.

Open-vocabulary Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) aims to generalize trackers to novel categories not in the training set. Currently, the best-performing methods are mainly based on pure appearance matching. Due to the complexity of motion patterns in the large-vocabulary scenarios and unstable classification of the novel objects, the motion and semantics cues are either ignored or applied based on heuristics in the final matching steps by existing methods. In this paper, we present a unified framework SLAck that jointly considers semantics, location, and appearance priors in the early steps of association and learns how to integrate all valuable information through a lightweight spatial and temporal object graph. Our method eliminates complex post-processing heuristics for fusing different cues and boosts the association performance significantly for large-scale open-vocabulary tracking. Without bells and whistles, we outperform previous state-of-the-art methods for novel classes tracking on the open-vocabulary MOT and TAO TETA benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/siyuanliii/SLAck{github.com/siyuanliii/SLAck}.

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

We present SpatialTrackerV2, a feed-forward 3D point tracking method for monocular videos. Going beyond modular pipelines built on off-the-shelf components for 3D tracking, our approach unifies the intrinsic connections between point tracking, monocular depth, and camera pose estimation into a high-performing and feedforward 3D point tracker. It decomposes world-space 3D motion into scene geometry, camera ego-motion, and pixel-wise object motion, with a fully differentiable and end-to-end architecture, allowing scalable training across a wide range of datasets, including synthetic sequences, posed RGB-D videos, and unlabeled in-the-wild footage. By learning geometry and motion jointly from such heterogeneous data, SpatialTrackerV2 outperforms existing 3D tracking methods by 30%, and matches the accuracy of leading dynamic 3D reconstruction approaches while running 50times faster.

In this paper, we propose ProTracker, a novel framework for robust and accurate long-term dense tracking of arbitrary points in videos. The key idea of our method is incorporating probabilistic integration to refine multiple predictions from both optical flow and semantic features for robust short-term and long-term tracking. Specifically, we integrate optical flow estimations in a probabilistic manner, producing smooth and accurate trajectories by maximizing the likelihood of each prediction. To effectively re-localize challenging points that disappear and reappear due to occlusion, we further incorporate long-term feature correspondence into our flow predictions for continuous trajectory generation. Extensive experiments show that ProTracker achieves the state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised and self-supervised approaches, and even outperforms supervised methods on several benchmarks. Our code and model will be publicly available upon publication.

Most model-free visual object tracking methods formulate the tracking task as object location estimation given by a 2D segmentation or a bounding box in each video frame. We argue that this representation is limited and instead propose to guide and improve 2D tracking with an explicit object representation, namely the textured 3D shape and 6DoF pose in each video frame. Our representation tackles a complex long-term dense correspondence problem between all 3D points on the object for all video frames, including frames where some points are invisible. To achieve that, the estimation is driven by re-rendering the input video frames as well as possible through differentiable rendering, which has not been used for tracking before. The proposed optimization minimizes a novel loss function to estimate the best 3D shape, texture, and 6DoF pose. We improve the state-of-the-art in 2D segmentation tracking on three different datasets with mostly rigid objects.

In this paper we present a new approach for efficient regression based object tracking which we refer to as Deep- LK. Our approach is closely related to the Generic Object Tracking Using Regression Networks (GOTURN) framework of Held et al. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate that there is a theoretical relationship between siamese regression networks like GOTURN and the classical Inverse-Compositional Lucas & Kanade (IC-LK) algorithm. Further, we demonstrate that unlike GOTURN IC-LK adapts its regressor to the appearance of the currently tracked frame. We argue that this missing property in GOTURN can be attributed to its poor performance on unseen objects and/or viewpoints. Second, we propose a novel framework for object tracking - which we refer to as Deep-LK - that is inspired by the IC-LK framework. Finally, we show impressive results demonstrating that Deep-LK substantially outperforms GOTURN. Additionally, we demonstrate comparable tracking performance to current state of the art deep-trackers whilst being an order of magnitude (i.e. 100 FPS) computationally efficient.

Video synopsis, summarizing a video to generate a shorter video by exploiting the spatial and temporal redundancies, is important for surveillance and archiving. Existing trajectory-based video synopsis algorithms will not able to work in real time, because of the complexity due to the number of object tubes that need to be included in the complex energy minimization algorithm. We propose a real-time algorithm by using a method that incrementally stitches each frame of the synopsis by extracting object frames from the user specified number of tubes in the buffer in contrast to global energy-minimization based systems. This also gives flexibility to the user to set the threshold of maximum number of objects in the synopsis video according his or her tracking ability and creates collision-free summarized videos which are visually pleasing. Experiments with six common test videos, indoors and outdoors with many moving objects, show that the proposed video synopsis algorithm produces better frame reduction rates than existing approaches.

Pose tracking is an important problem that requires identifying unique human pose-instances and matching them temporally across different frames of a video. However, existing pose tracking methods are unable to accurately model temporal relationships and require significant computation, often computing the tracks offline. We present an efficient Multi-person Pose Tracking method, KeyTrack, that only relies on keypoint information without using any RGB or optical flow information to track human keypoints in real-time. Keypoints are tracked using our Pose Entailment method, in which, first, a pair of pose estimates is sampled from different frames in a video and tokenized. Then, a Transformer-based network makes a binary classification as to whether one pose temporally follows another. Furthermore, we improve our top-down pose estimation method with a novel, parameter-free, keypoint refinement technique that improves the keypoint estimates used during the Pose Entailment step. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the PoseTrack'17 and the PoseTrack'18 benchmarks while using only a fraction of the computation required by most other methods for computing the tracking information.

Existing visual tracking methods typically take an image patch as the reference of the target to perform tracking. However, a single image patch cannot provide a complete and precise concept of the target object as images are limited in their ability to abstract and can be ambiguous, which makes it difficult to track targets with drastic variations. In this paper, we propose the CiteTracker to enhance target modeling and inference in visual tracking by connecting images and text. Specifically, we develop a text generation module to convert the target image patch into a descriptive text containing its class and attribute information, providing a comprehensive reference point for the target. In addition, a dynamic description module is designed to adapt to target variations for more effective target representation. We then associate the target description and the search image using an attention-based correlation module to generate the correlated features for target state reference. Extensive experiments on five diverse datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm and the favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed tracking method.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been a long-standing challenge in video understanding. A natural and intuitive approach is to split this task into two parts: object detection and association. Most mainstream methods employ meticulously crafted heuristic techniques to maintain trajectory information and compute cost matrices for object matching. Although these methods can achieve notable tracking performance, they often require a series of elaborate handcrafted modifications while facing complicated scenarios. We believe that manually assumed priors limit the method's adaptability and flexibility in learning optimal tracking capabilities from domain-specific data. Therefore, we introduce a new perspective that treats Multiple Object Tracking as an in-context ID Prediction task, transforming the aforementioned object association into an end-to-end trainable task. Based on this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed MOTIP. Given a set of trajectories carried with ID information, MOTIP directly decodes the ID labels for current detections to accomplish the association process. Without using tailored or sophisticated architectures, our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks by solely leveraging object-level features as tracking cues. The simplicity and impressive results of MOTIP leave substantial room for future advancements, thereby making it a promising baseline for subsequent research. Our code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOTIP.

For a long time, the most common paradigm in Multi-Object Tracking was tracking-by-detection (TbD), where objects are first detected and then associated over video frames. For association, most models resourced to motion and appearance cues, e.g., re-identification networks. Recent approaches based on attention propose to learn the cues in a data-driven manner, showing impressive results. In this paper, we ask ourselves whether simple good old TbD methods are also capable of achieving the performance of end-to-end models. To this end, we propose two key ingredients that allow a standard re-identification network to excel at appearance-based tracking. We extensively analyse its failure cases, and show that a combination of our appearance features with a simple motion model leads to strong tracking results. Our tracker generalizes to four public datasets, namely MOT17, MOT20, BDD100k, and DanceTrack, achieving state-of-the-art performance. https://github.com/dvl-tum/GHOST.

The aim of multiple object tracking (MOT) is to detect all objects in a video and bind them into multiple trajectories. Generally, this process is carried out in two steps: detecting objects and associating them across frames based on various cues and metrics. Many studies and applications adopt object appearance, also known as re-identification (ReID) features, for target matching through straightforward similarity calculation. However, we argue that this practice is overly naive and thus overlooks the unique characteristics of MOT tasks. Unlike regular re-identification tasks that strive to distinguish all potential targets in a general representation, multi-object tracking typically immerses itself in differentiating similar targets within the same video sequence. Therefore, we believe that seeking a more suitable feature representation space based on the different sample distributions of each sequence will enhance tracking performance. In this paper, we propose using history-aware transformations on ReID features to achieve more discriminative appearance representations. Specifically, we treat historical trajectory features as conditions and employ a tailored Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) to find a spatial projection matrix that maximizes the differentiation between different trajectories. Our extensive experiments reveal that this training-free projection can significantly boost feature-only trackers to achieve competitive, even superior tracking performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while also demonstrating impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal and further encourages future investigation into the importance and customization of ReID models in multiple object tracking. The code will be released at https://github.com/HELLORPG/HATReID-MOT.

The goal of multi-object tracking (MOT) is detecting and tracking all the objects in a scene, while keeping a unique identifier for each object. In this paper, we present a new robust state-of-the-art tracker, which can combine the advantages of motion and appearance information, along with camera-motion compensation, and a more accurate Kalman filter state vector. Our new trackers BoT-SORT, and BoT-SORT-ReID rank first in the datasets of MOTChallenge [29, 11] on both MOT17 and MOT20 test sets, in terms of all the main MOT metrics: MOTA, IDF1, and HOTA. For MOT17: 80.5 MOTA, 80.2 IDF1, and 65.0 HOTA are achieved. The source code and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/NirAharon/BOT-SORT

Tracking Any Point (TAP) in a video is a challenging computer vision problem with many demonstrated applications in robotics, video editing, and 3D reconstruction. Existing methods for TAP rely heavily on complex tracking-specific inductive biases and heuristics, limiting their generality and potential for scaling. To address these challenges, we present TAPNext, a new approach that casts TAP as sequential masked token decoding. Our model is causal, tracks in a purely online fashion, and removes tracking-specific inductive biases. This enables TAPNext to run with minimal latency, and removes the temporal windowing required by many existing state of art trackers. Despite its simplicity, TAPNext achieves a new state-of-the-art tracking performance among both online and offline trackers. Finally, we present evidence that many widely used tracking heuristics emerge naturally in TAPNext through end-to-end training.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, tracking by associating almost every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. When applied to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers, our method achieves consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. ByteTrack also achieves state-of-the-art performance on MOT20, HiEve and BDD100K tracking benchmarks. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.

To track the 3D locations and trajectories of the other traffic participants at any given time, modern autonomous vehicles are equipped with multiple cameras that cover the vehicle's full surroundings. Yet, camera-based 3D object tracking methods prioritize optimizing the single-camera setup and resort to post-hoc fusion in a multi-camera setup. In this paper, we propose a method for panoramic 3D object tracking, called CC-3DT, that associates and models object trajectories both temporally and across views, and improves the overall tracking consistency. In particular, our method fuses 3D detections from multiple cameras before association, reducing identity switches significantly and improving motion modeling. Our experiments on large-scale driving datasets show that fusion before association leads to a large margin of improvement over post-hoc fusion. We set a new state-of-the-art with 12.6% improvement in average multi-object tracking accuracy (AMOTA) among all camera-based methods on the competitive NuScenes 3D tracking benchmark, outperforming previously published methods by 6.5% in AMOTA with the same 3D detector.

This paper proposes CAMOT, a simple camera angle estimator for multi-object tracking to tackle two problems: 1) occlusion and 2) inaccurate distance estimation in the depth direction. Under the assumption that multiple objects are located on a flat plane in each video frame, CAMOT estimates the camera angle using object detection. In addition, it gives the depth of each object, enabling pseudo-3D MOT. We evaluated its performance by adding it to various 2D MOT methods on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets and confirmed its effectiveness. Applying CAMOT to ByteTrack, we obtained 63.8% HOTA, 80.6% MOTA, and 78.5% IDF1 in MOT17, which are state-of-the-art results. Its computational cost is significantly lower than the existing deep-learning-based depth estimators for tracking.

Online multi-object tracking has been recently dominated by tracking-by-detection (TbD) methods, where recent advances rely on increasingly sophisticated heuristics for tracklet representation, feature fusion, and multi-stage matching. The key strength of TbD lies in its modular design, enabling the integration of specialized off-the-shelf models like motion predictors and re-identification. However, the extensive usage of human-crafted rules for temporal associations makes these methods inherently limited in their ability to capture the complex interplay between various tracking cues. In this work, we introduce CAMEL, a novel association module for Context-Aware Multi-Cue ExpLoitation, that learns resilient association strategies directly from data, breaking free from hand-crafted heuristics while maintaining TbD's valuable modularity. At its core, CAMEL employs two transformer-based modules and relies on a novel association-centric training scheme to effectively model the complex interactions between tracked targets and their various association cues. Unlike end-to-end detection-by-tracking approaches, our method remains lightweight and fast to train while being able to leverage external off-the-shelf models. Our proposed online tracking pipeline, CAMELTrack, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tracking benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/TrackingLaboratory/CAMELTrack.

Despite the numerous developments in object tracking, further development of current tracking algorithms is limited by small and mostly saturated datasets. As a matter of fact, data-hungry trackers based on deep-learning currently rely on object detection datasets due to the scarcity of dedicated large-scale tracking datasets. In this work, we present TrackingNet, the first large-scale dataset and benchmark for object tracking in the wild. We provide more than 30K videos with more than 14 million dense bounding box annotations. Our dataset covers a wide selection of object classes in broad and diverse context. By releasing such a large-scale dataset, we expect deep trackers to further improve and generalize. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark composed of 500 novel videos, modeled with a distribution similar to our training dataset. By sequestering the annotation of the test set and providing an online evaluation server, we provide a fair benchmark for future development of object trackers. Deep trackers fine-tuned on a fraction of our dataset improve their performance by up to 1.6% on OTB100 and up to 1.7% on TrackingNet Test. We provide an extensive benchmark on TrackingNet by evaluating more than 20 trackers. Our results suggest that object tracking in the wild is far from being solved.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the task of estimating the state trajectories of an unknown and time-varying number of objects over a certain time window. Several algorithms have been proposed to tackle the multi-object smoothing task, where object detections can be conditioned on all the measurements in the time window. However, the best-performing methods suffer from intractable computational complexity and require approximations, performing suboptimally in complex settings. Deep learning based algorithms are a possible venue for tackling this issue but have not been applied extensively in settings where accurate multi-object models are available and measurements are low-dimensional. We propose a novel DL architecture specifically tailored for this setting that decouples the data association task from the smoothing task. We compare the performance of the proposed smoother to the state-of-the-art in different tasks of varying difficulty and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison between traditional Bayesian trackers and DL trackers in the smoothing problem setting.

In this paper, we aim to design an efficient real-time object detector that exceeds the YOLO series and is easily extensible for many object recognition tasks such as instance segmentation and rotated object detection. To obtain a more efficient model architecture, we explore an architecture that has compatible capacities in the backbone and neck, constructed by a basic building block that consists of large-kernel depth-wise convolutions. We further introduce soft labels when calculating matching costs in the dynamic label assignment to improve accuracy. Together with better training techniques, the resulting object detector, named RTMDet, achieves 52.8% AP on COCO with 300+ FPS on an NVIDIA 3090 GPU, outperforming the current mainstream industrial detectors. RTMDet achieves the best parameter-accuracy trade-off with tiny/small/medium/large/extra-large model sizes for various application scenarios, and obtains new state-of-the-art performance on real-time instance segmentation and rotated object detection. We hope the experimental results can provide new insights into designing versatile real-time object detectors for many object recognition tasks. Code and models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/tree/3.x/configs/rtmdet.

Recently, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has attracted rising attention, and accordingly, remarkable progresses have been achieved. However, the existing methods tend to use various basic models (e.g, detector and embedding model), and different training or inference tricks, etc. As a result, the construction of a good baseline for a fair comparison is essential. In this paper, a classic tracker, i.e., DeepSORT, is first revisited, and then is significantly improved from multiple perspectives such as object detection, feature embedding, and trajectory association. The proposed tracker, named StrongSORT, contributes a strong and fair baseline for the MOT community. Moreover, two lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms are proposed to address two inherent "missing" problems of MOT: missing association and missing detection. Specifically, unlike most methods, which associate short tracklets into complete trajectories at high computation complexity, we propose an appearance-free link model (AFLink) to perform global association without appearance information, and achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation (GSI) based on Gaussian process regression to relieve the missing detection. AFLink and GSI can be easily plugged into various trackers with a negligible extra computational cost (1.7 ms and 7.1 ms per image, respectively, on MOT17). Finally, by fusing StrongSORT with AFLink and GSI, the final tracker (StrongSORT++) achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack and KITTI. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/StrongSORT and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmtracking.

Tracking dense 3D motion from monocular videos remains challenging, particularly when aiming for pixel-level precision over long sequences. We introduce \Approach, a novel method that efficiently tracks every pixel in 3D space, enabling accurate motion estimation across entire videos. Our approach leverages a joint global-local attention mechanism for reduced-resolution tracking, followed by a transformer-based upsampler to achieve high-resolution predictions. Unlike existing methods, which are limited by computational inefficiency or sparse tracking, \Approach delivers dense 3D tracking at scale, running over 8x faster than previous methods while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. Furthermore, we explore the impact of depth representation on tracking performance and identify log-depth as the optimal choice. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of \Approach on multiple benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results in both 2D and 3D dense tracking tasks. Our method provides a robust solution for applications requiring fine-grained, long-term motion tracking in 3D space.

Temporal consistency is critical in video prediction to ensure that outputs are coherent and free of artifacts. Traditional methods, such as temporal attention and 3D convolution, may struggle with significant object motion and may not capture long-range temporal dependencies in dynamic scenes. To address this gap, we propose the Tracktention Layer, a novel architectural component that explicitly integrates motion information using point tracks, i.e., sequences of corresponding points across frames. By incorporating these motion cues, the Tracktention Layer enhances temporal alignment and effectively handles complex object motions, maintaining consistent feature representations over time. Our approach is computationally efficient and can be seamlessly integrated into existing models, such as Vision Transformers, with minimal modification. It can be used to upgrade image-only models to state-of-the-art video ones, sometimes outperforming models natively designed for video prediction. We demonstrate this on video depth prediction and video colorization, where models augmented with the Tracktention Layer exhibit significantly improved temporal consistency compared to baselines.

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S^2L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Xavier-Lin/TrackSSM.

Tracking any given object(s) spatially and temporally is a common purpose in Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Video Object Segmentation (VOS). Joint tracking and segmentation have been attempted in some studies but they often lack full compatibility of both box and mask in initialization and prediction, and mainly focus on single-object scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Multi-object Mask-box Integrated framework for unified Tracking and Segmentation, dubbed MITS. Firstly, the unified identification module is proposed to support both box and mask reference for initialization, where detailed object information is inferred from boxes or directly retained from masks. Additionally, a novel pinpoint box predictor is proposed for accurate multi-object box prediction, facilitating target-oriented representation learning. All target objects are processed simultaneously from encoding to propagation and decoding, as a unified pipeline for VOT and VOS. Experimental results show MITS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and VOS benchmarks. Notably, MITS surpasses the best prior VOT competitor by around 6% on the GOT-10k test set, and significantly improves the performance of box initialization on VOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoxu515/MITS.

In this paper, we present a novel benchmark, GSOT3D, that aims at facilitating development of generic 3D single object tracking (SOT) in the wild. Specifically, GSOT3D offers 620 sequences with 123K frames, and covers a wide selection of 54 object categories. Each sequence is offered with multiple modalities, including the point cloud (PC), RGB image, and depth. This allows GSOT3D to support various 3D tracking tasks, such as single-modal 3D SOT on PC and multi-modal 3D SOT on RGB-PC or RGB-D, and thus greatly broadens research directions for 3D object tracking. To provide highquality per-frame 3D annotations, all sequences are labeled manually with multiple rounds of meticulous inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, GSOT3D is the largest benchmark dedicated to various generic 3D object tracking tasks. To understand how existing 3D trackers perform and to provide comparisons for future research on GSOT3D, we assess eight representative point cloud-based tracking models. Our evaluation results exhibit that these models heavily degrade on GSOT3D, and more efforts are required for robust and generic 3D object tracking. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a simple yet effective generic 3D tracker, named PROT3D, that localizes the target object via a progressive spatial-temporal network and outperforms all current solutions by a large margin. By releasing GSOT3D, we expect to advance further 3D tracking in future research and applications. Our benchmark and model as well as the evaluation results will be publicly released at our webpage https://github.com/ailovejinx/GSOT3D.

We introduce LocoTrack, a highly accurate and efficient model designed for the task of tracking any point (TAP) across video sequences. Previous approaches in this task often rely on local 2D correlation maps to establish correspondences from a point in the query image to a local region in the target image, which often struggle with homogeneous regions or repetitive features, leading to matching ambiguities. LocoTrack overcomes this challenge with a novel approach that utilizes all-pair correspondences across regions, i.e., local 4D correlation, to establish precise correspondences, with bidirectional correspondence and matching smoothness significantly enhancing robustness against ambiguities. We also incorporate a lightweight correlation encoder to enhance computational efficiency, and a compact Transformer architecture to integrate long-term temporal information. LocoTrack achieves unmatched accuracy on all TAP-Vid benchmarks and operates at a speed almost 6 times faster than the current state-of-the-art.

Tracking objects in three-dimensional space is critical for autonomous driving. To ensure safety while driving, the tracker must be able to reliably track objects across frames and accurately estimate their states such as velocity and acceleration in the present. Existing works frequently focus on the association task while either neglecting the model performance on state estimation or deploying complex heuristics to predict the states. In this paper, we propose STT, a Stateful Tracking model built with Transformers, that can consistently track objects in the scenes while also predicting their states accurately. STT consumes rich appearance, geometry, and motion signals through long term history of detections and is jointly optimized for both data association and state estimation tasks. Since the standard tracking metrics like MOTA and MOTP do not capture the combined performance of the two tasks in the wider spectrum of object states, we extend them with new metrics called S-MOTA and MOTPS that address this limitation. STT achieves competitive real-time performance on the Waymo Open Dataset.

As a video task, Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is expected to capture temporal information of targets effectively. Unfortunately, most existing methods only explicitly exploit the object features between adjacent frames, while lacking the capacity to model long-term temporal information. In this paper, we propose MeMOTR, a long-term memory-augmented Transformer for multi-object tracking. Our method is able to make the same object's track embedding more stable and distinguishable by leveraging long-term memory injection with a customized memory-attention layer. This significantly improves the target association ability of our model. Experimental results on DanceTrack show that MeMOTR impressively surpasses the state-of-the-art method by 7.9% and 13.0% on HOTA and AssA metrics, respectively. Furthermore, our model also outperforms other Transformer-based methods on association performance on MOT17 and generalizes well on BDD100K. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MeMOTR.

We propose a novel algorithm for accelerating dense long-term 3D point tracking in videos. Through analysis of existing state-of-the-art methods, we identify two major computational bottlenecks. First, transformer-based iterative tracking becomes expensive when handling a large number of trajectories. To address this, we introduce a coarse-to-fine strategy that begins tracking with a small subset of points and progressively expands the set of tracked trajectories. The newly added trajectories are initialized using a learnable interpolation module, which is trained end-to-end alongside the tracking network. Second, we propose an optimization that significantly reduces the cost of correlation feature computation, another key bottleneck in prior methods. Together, these improvements lead to a 5-100x speedup over existing approaches while maintaining state-of-the-art tracking accuracy.

We introduce AllTracker: a model that estimates long-range point tracks by way of estimating the flow field between a query frame and every other frame of a video. Unlike existing point tracking methods, our approach delivers high-resolution and dense (all-pixel) correspondence fields, which can be visualized as flow maps. Unlike existing optical flow methods, our approach corresponds one frame to hundreds of subsequent frames, rather than just the next frame. We develop a new architecture for this task, blending techniques from existing work in optical flow and point tracking: the model performs iterative inference on low-resolution grids of correspondence estimates, propagating information spatially via 2D convolution layers, and propagating information temporally via pixel-aligned attention layers. The model is fast and parameter-efficient (16 million parameters), and delivers state-of-the-art point tracking accuracy at high resolution (i.e., tracking 768x1024 pixels, on a 40G GPU). A benefit of our design is that we can train on a wider set of datasets, and we find that doing so is crucial for top performance. We provide an extensive ablation study on our architecture details and training recipe, making it clear which details matter most. Our code and model weights are available at https://alltracker.github.io .

Tracking pixels in videos is typically studied as an optical flow estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a displacement vector that locates it in the next frame. Even though wider temporal context is freely available, prior efforts to take this into account have yielded only small gains over 2-frame methods. In this paper, we revisit Sand and Teller's "particle video" approach, and study pixel tracking as a long-range motion estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a trajectory that locates it in multiple future frames. We re-build this classic approach using components that drive the current state-of-the-art in flow and object tracking, such as dense cost maps, iterative optimization, and learned appearance updates. We train our models using long-range amodal point trajectories mined from existing optical flow data that we synthetically augment with multi-frame occlusions. We test our approach in trajectory estimation benchmarks and in keypoint label propagation tasks, and compare favorably against state-of-the-art optical flow and feature tracking methods.

Vision sensors are becoming more important in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for traffic monitoring, management, and optimization as the number of network cameras continues to rise. However, manual object tracking and matching across multiple non-overlapping cameras pose significant challenges in city-scale urban traffic scenarios. These challenges include handling diverse vehicle attributes, occlusions, illumination variations, shadows, and varying video resolutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and cost-effective deep learning-based framework for Multi-Object Multi-Camera Tracking (MO-MCT). The proposed framework utilizes Mask R-CNN for object detection and employs Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to select target objects from overlapping detections. Transfer learning is employed for re-identification, enabling the association and generation of vehicle tracklets across multiple cameras. Moreover, we leverage appropriate loss functions and distance measures to handle occlusion, illumination, and shadow challenges. The final solution identification module performs feature extraction using ResNet-152 coupled with Deep SORT based vehicle tracking. The proposed framework is evaluated on the 5th AI City Challenge dataset (Track 3), comprising 46 camera feeds. Among these 46 camera streams, 40 are used for model training and validation, while the remaining six are utilized for model testing. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with an IDF1 score of 0.8289, and precision and recall scores of 0.9026 and 0.8527 respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in robust and accurate vehicle tracking.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) at low frame rates can reduce computational, storage and power overhead to better meet the constraints of edge devices. Many existing MOT methods suffer from significant performance degradation in low-frame-rate videos due to significant location and appearance changes between adjacent frames. To this end, we propose to explore collaborative tracking learning (ColTrack) for frame-rate-insensitive MOT in a query-based end-to-end manner. Multiple historical queries of the same target jointly track it with richer temporal descriptions. Meanwhile, we insert an information refinement module between every two temporal blocking decoders to better fuse temporal clues and refine features. Moreover, a tracking object consistency loss is proposed to guide the interaction between historical queries. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that in high-frame-rate videos, ColTrack obtains higher performance than state-of-the-art methods on large-scale datasets Dancetrack and BDD100K, and outperforms the existing end-to-end methods on MOT17. More importantly, ColTrack has a significant advantage over state-of-the-art methods in low-frame-rate videos, which allows it to obtain faster processing speeds by reducing frame-rate requirements while maintaining higher performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/yolomax/ColTrack

Methods for video motion prediction either estimate jointly the instantaneous motion of all points in a given video frame using optical flow or independently track the motion of individual points throughout the video. The latter is true even for powerful deep-learning methods that can track points through occlusions. Tracking points individually ignores the strong correlation that can exist between the points, for instance, because they belong to the same physical object, potentially harming performance. In this paper, we thus propose CoTracker, an architecture that jointly tracks multiple points throughout an entire video. This architecture combines several ideas from the optical flow and tracking literature in a new, flexible and powerful design. It is based on a transformer network that models the correlation of different points in time via specialised attention layers. The transformer iteratively updates an estimate of several trajectories. It can be applied in a sliding-window manner to very long videos, for which we engineer an unrolled training loop. It can track from one to several points jointly and supports adding new points to track at any time. The result is a flexible and powerful tracking algorithm that outperforms state-of-the-art methods in almost all benchmarks.

In recent years, the development of deep learning approaches for the task of person re-identification led to impressive results. However, this comes with a limitation for industrial and practical real-world applications. Firstly, most of the existing works operate on closed-world scenarios, in which the people to re-identify (probes) are compared to a closed-set (gallery). Real-world scenarios often are open-set problems in which the gallery is not known a priori, but the number of open-set approaches in the literature is significantly lower. Secondly, challenges such as multi-camera setups, occlusions, real-time requirements, etc., further constrain the applicability of off-the-shelf methods. This work presents MICRO-TRACK, a Modular Industrial multi-Camera Re_identification and Open-set Tracking system that is real-time, scalable, and easy to integrate into existing industrial surveillance scenarios. Furthermore, we release a novel Re-ID and tracking dataset acquired in an industrial manufacturing facility, dubbed Facility-ReID, consisting of 18-minute videos captured by 8 surveillance cameras.

Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.

Tracking human object interaction from videos is important to understand human behavior from the rapidly growing stream of video data. Previous video-based methods require predefined object templates while single-image-based methods are template-free but lack temporal consistency. In this paper, we present a method to track human object interaction without any object shape templates. We decompose the 4D tracking problem into per-frame pose tracking and canonical shape optimization. We first apply a single-view reconstruction method to obtain temporally-inconsistent per-frame interaction reconstructions. Then, for the human, we propose an efficient autoencoder to predict SMPL vertices directly from the per-frame reconstructions, introducing temporally consistent correspondence. For the object, we introduce a pose estimator that leverages temporal information to predict smooth object rotations under occlusions. To train our model, we propose a method to generate synthetic interaction videos and synthesize in total 10 hour videos of 8.5k sequences with full 3D ground truth. Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our method significantly outperforms previous template-based video tracking and single-frame reconstruction methods. Our proposed synthetic video dataset also allows training video-based methods that generalize to real-world videos. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.

Recent years have seen substantial progress in diffusion-based controllable video generation. However, achieving precise control in complex scenarios, including fine-grained object parts, sophisticated motion trajectories, and coherent background movement, remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce TrackGo, a novel approach that leverages free-form masks and arrows for conditional video generation. This method offers users with a flexible and precise mechanism for manipulating video content. We also propose the TrackAdapter for control implementation, an efficient and lightweight adapter designed to be seamlessly integrated into the temporal self-attention layers of a pretrained video generation model. This design leverages our observation that the attention map of these layers can accurately activate regions corresponding to motion in videos. Our experimental results demonstrate that our new approach, enhanced by the TrackAdapter, achieves state-of-the-art performance on key metrics such as FVD, FID, and ObjMC scores. The project page of TrackGo can be found at: https://zhtjtcz.github.io/TrackGo-Page/

Advanced video analytic systems, including scene classification and object detection, have seen widespread success in various domains such as smart cities and autonomous transportation. With an ever-growing number of powerful client devices, there is incentive to move these heavy video analytics workloads from the cloud to mobile devices to achieve low latency and real-time processing and to preserve user privacy. However, most video analytic systems are heavyweight and are trained offline with some pre-defined latency or accuracy requirements. This makes them unable to adapt at runtime in the face of three types of dynamism -- the input video characteristics change, the amount of compute resources available on the node changes due to co-located applications, and the user's latency-accuracy requirements change. In this paper we introduce ApproxDet, an adaptive video object detection framework for mobile devices to meet accuracy-latency requirements in the face of changing content and resource contention scenarios. To achieve this, we introduce a multi-branch object detection kernel (layered on Faster R-CNN), which incorporates a data-driven modeling approach on the performance metrics, and a latency SLA-driven scheduler to pick the best execution branch at runtime. We couple this kernel with approximable video object tracking algorithms to create an end-to-end video object detection system. We evaluate ApproxDet on a large benchmark video dataset and compare quantitatively to AdaScale and YOLOv3. We find that ApproxDet is able to adapt to a wide variety of contention and content characteristics and outshines all baselines, e.g., it achieves 52% lower latency and 11.1% higher accuracy over YOLOv3.

We present a novel model for Tracking Any Point (TAP) that effectively tracks any queried point on any physical surface throughout a video sequence. Our approach employs two stages: (1) a matching stage, which independently locates a suitable candidate point match for the query point on every other frame, and (2) a refinement stage, which updates both the trajectory and query features based on local correlations. The resulting model surpasses all baseline methods by a significant margin on the TAP-Vid benchmark, as demonstrated by an approximate 20% absolute average Jaccard (AJ) improvement on DAVIS. Our model facilitates fast inference on long and high-resolution video sequences. On a modern GPU, our implementation has the capacity to track points faster than real-time, and can be flexibly extended to higher-resolution videos. Given the high-quality trajectories extracted from a large dataset, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept diffusion model which generates trajectories from static images, enabling plausible animations. Visualizations, source code, and pretrained models can be found on our project webpage.

The field of multi-object tracking has recently seen a renewed interest in the good old schema of tracking-by-detection, as its simplicity and strong priors spare it from the complex design and painful babysitting of tracking-by-attention approaches. In view of this, we aim at extending tracking-by-detection to multi-modal settings, where a comprehensive cost has to be computed from heterogeneous information e.g., 2D motion cues, visual appearance, and pose estimates. More precisely, we follow a case study where a rough estimate of 3D information is also available and must be merged with other traditional metrics (e.g., the IoU). To achieve that, recent approaches resort to either simple rules or complex heuristics to balance the contribution of each cost. However, i) they require careful tuning of tailored hyperparameters on a hold-out set, and ii) they imply these costs to be independent, which does not hold in reality. We address these issues by building upon an elegant probabilistic formulation, which considers the cost of a candidate association as the negative log-likelihood yielded by a deep density estimator, trained to model the conditional joint probability distribution of correct associations. Our experiments, conducted on both simulated and real benchmarks, show that our approach consistently enhances the performance of several tracking-by-detection algorithms.

Tracking a point through a video can be a challenging task due to uncertainty arising from visual obfuscations, such as appearance changes and occlusions. Although current state-of-the-art discriminative models excel in regressing long-term point trajectory estimates -- even through occlusions -- they are limited to regressing to a mean (or mode) in the presence of uncertainty, and fail to capture multi-modality. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Generative Point Tracker (GenPT), a generative framework for modelling multi-modal trajectories. GenPT is trained with a novel flow matching formulation that combines the iterative refinement of discriminative trackers, a window-dependent prior for cross-window consistency, and a variance schedule tuned specifically for point coordinates. We show how our model's generative capabilities can be leveraged to improve point trajectory estimates by utilizing a best-first search strategy on generated samples during inference, guided by the model's own confidence of its predictions. Empirically, we evaluate GenPT against the current state of the art on the standard PointOdyssey, Dynamic Replica, and TAP-Vid benchmarks. Further, we introduce a TAP-Vid variant with additional occlusions to assess occluded point tracking performance and highlight our model's ability to capture multi-modality. GenPT is capable of capturing the multi-modality in point trajectories, which translates to state-of-the-art tracking accuracy on occluded points, while maintaining competitive tracking accuracy on visible points compared to extant discriminative point trackers.

Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.

Tracking any point (TAP) recently shifted the motion estimation paradigm from focusing on individual salient points with local templates to tracking arbitrary points with global image contexts. However, while research has mostly focused on driving the accuracy of models in nominal settings, addressing scenarios with difficult lighting conditions and high-speed motions remains out of reach due to the limitations of the sensor. This work addresses this challenge with the first event camera-based TAP method. It leverages the high temporal resolution and high dynamic range of event cameras for robust high-speed tracking, and the global contexts in TAP methods to handle asynchronous and sparse event measurements. We further extend the TAP framework to handle event feature variations induced by motion -- thereby addressing an open challenge in purely event-based tracking -- with a novel feature-alignment loss which ensures the learning of motion-robust features. Our method is trained with data from a new data generation pipeline and systematically ablated across all design decisions. Our method shows strong cross-dataset generalization and performs 136% better on the average Jaccard metric than the baselines. Moreover, on an established feature tracking benchmark, it achieves a 20% improvement over the previous best event-only method and even surpasses the previous best events-and-frames method by 4.1%. Our code is available at https://github.com/tub-rip/ETAP

Siamese network-based trackers have shown remarkable success in aerial tracking. Most previous works, however, usually perform template matching only between the initial template and the search region and thus fail to deal with rapidly changing targets that often appear in aerial tracking. As a remedy, this work presents Building Appearance Collection Tracking (BACTrack). This simple yet effective tracking framework builds a dynamic collection of target templates online and performs efficient multi-template matching to achieve robust tracking. Specifically, BACTrack mainly comprises a Mixed-Temporal Transformer (MTT) and an appearance discriminator. The former is responsible for efficiently building relationships between the search region and multiple target templates in parallel through a mixed-temporal attention mechanism. At the same time, the appearance discriminator employs an online adaptive template-update strategy to ensure that the collected multiple templates remain reliable and diverse, allowing them to closely follow rapid changes in the target's appearance and suppress background interference during tracking. Extensive experiments show that our BACTrack achieves top performance on four challenging aerial tracking benchmarks while maintaining an impressive speed of over 87 FPS on a single GPU. Speed tests on embedded platforms also validate our potential suitability for deployment on UAV platforms.

We introduce FeatureSORT, a simple yet effective online multiple object tracker that reinforces the DeepSORT baseline with a redesigned detector and additional feature cues. In contrast to conventional detectors that only provide bounding boxes, our modified YOLOX architecture is extended to output multiple appearance attributes, including clothing color, clothing style, and motion direction, alongside the bounding boxes. These feature cues, together with a ReID network, form complementary embeddings that substantially improve association accuracy. Furthermore, we incorporate stronger post-processing strategies, such as global linking and Gaussian Smoothing Process interpolation, to handle missing associations and detections. During online tracking, we define a measurement-to-track distance function that jointly considers IoU, direction, color, style, and ReID similarity. This design enables FeatureSORT to maintain consistent identities through longer occlusions while reducing identity switches. Extensive experiments on standard MOT benchmarks demonstrate that FeatureSORT achieves state-of-the-art online performance, with MOTA scores of 79.7 on MOT16, 80.6 on MOT17, 77.9 on MOT20, and 92.2 on DanceTrack, underscoring the effectiveness of feature-enriched detection and modular post processing in advancing multi-object tracking.

A reliable and accurate 3D tracking framework is essential for predicting future locations of surrounding objects and planning the observer's actions in numerous applications such as autonomous driving. We propose a framework that can effectively associate moving objects over time and estimate their full 3D bounding box information from a sequence of 2D images captured on a moving platform. The object association leverages quasi-dense similarity learning to identify objects in various poses and viewpoints with appearance cues only. After initial 2D association, we further utilize 3D bounding boxes depth-ordering heuristics for robust instance association and motion-based 3D trajectory prediction for re-identification of occluded vehicles. In the end, an LSTM-based object velocity learning module aggregates the long-term trajectory information for more accurate motion extrapolation. Experiments on our proposed simulation data and real-world benchmarks, including KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets, show that our tracking framework offers robust object association and tracking on urban-driving scenarios. On the Waymo Open benchmark, we establish the first camera-only baseline in the 3D tracking and 3D detection challenges. Our quasi-dense 3D tracking pipeline achieves impressive improvements on the nuScenes 3D tracking benchmark with near five times tracking accuracy of the best vision-only submission among all published methods. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/SysCV/qd-3dt.

We introduce the first data-driven multi-view 3D point tracker, designed to track arbitrary points in dynamic scenes using multiple camera views. Unlike existing monocular trackers, which struggle with depth ambiguities and occlusion, or prior multi-camera methods that require over 20 cameras and tedious per-sequence optimization, our feed-forward model directly predicts 3D correspondences using a practical number of cameras (e.g., four), enabling robust and accurate online tracking. Given known camera poses and either sensor-based or estimated multi-view depth, our tracker fuses multi-view features into a unified point cloud and applies k-nearest-neighbors correlation alongside a transformer-based update to reliably estimate long-range 3D correspondences, even under occlusion. We train on 5K synthetic multi-view Kubric sequences and evaluate on two real-world benchmarks: Panoptic Studio and DexYCB, achieving median trajectory errors of 3.1 cm and 2.0 cm, respectively. Our method generalizes well to diverse camera setups of 1-8 views with varying vantage points and video lengths of 24-150 frames. By releasing our tracker alongside training and evaluation datasets, we aim to set a new standard for multi-view 3D tracking research and provide a practical tool for real-world applications. Project page available at https://ethz-vlg.github.io/mvtracker.

Many image-based perception tasks can be formulated as detecting, associating and tracking semantic keypoints, e.g., human body pose estimation and tracking. In this work, we present a general framework that jointly detects and forms spatio-temporal keypoint associations in a single stage, making this the first real-time pose detection and tracking algorithm. We present a generic neural network architecture that uses Composite Fields to detect and construct a spatio-temporal pose which is a single, connected graph whose nodes are the semantic keypoints (e.g., a person's body joints) in multiple frames. For the temporal associations, we introduce the Temporal Composite Association Field (TCAF) which requires an extended network architecture and training method beyond previous Composite Fields. Our experiments show competitive accuracy while being an order of magnitude faster on multiple publicly available datasets such as COCO, CrowdPose and the PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets. We also show that our method generalizes to any class of semantic keypoints such as car and animal parts to provide a holistic perception framework that is well suited for urban mobility such as self-driving cars and delivery robots.

Memory-based trackers are video object segmentation methods that form the target model by concatenating recently tracked frames into a memory buffer and localize the target by attending the current image to the buffered frames. While already achieving top performance on many benchmarks, it was the recent release of SAM2 that placed memory-based trackers into focus of the visual object tracking community. Nevertheless, modern trackers still struggle in the presence of distractors. We argue that a more sophisticated memory model is required, and propose a new distractor-aware memory model for SAM2 and an introspection-based update strategy that jointly addresses the segmentation accuracy as well as tracking robustness. The resulting tracker is denoted as SAM2.1++. We also propose a new distractor-distilled DiDi dataset to study the distractor problem better. SAM2.1++ outperforms SAM2.1 and related SAM memory extensions on seven benchmarks and sets a solid new state-of-the-art on six of them.

Depth-aware video panoptic segmentation is a promising approach to camera based scene understanding. However, the current state-of-the-art methods require costly video annotations and use a complex training pipeline compared to their image-based equivalents. In this paper, we present a new approach titled Unified Perception that achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring video-based training. Our method employs a simple two-stage cascaded tracking algorithm that (re)uses object embeddings computed in an image-based network. Experimental results on the Cityscapes-DVPS dataset demonstrate that our method achieves an overall DVPQ of 57.1, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our tracking strategies are effective for long-term object association on KITTI-STEP, achieving an STQ of 59.1 which exceeded the performance of state-of-the-art methods that employ the same backbone network. Code is available at: https://tue-mps.github.io/unipercept

Recently, Siamese networks have drawn great attention in visual tracking community because of their balanced accuracy and speed. However, features used in most Siamese tracking approaches can only discriminate foreground from the non-semantic backgrounds. The semantic backgrounds are always considered as distractors, which hinders the robustness of Siamese trackers. In this paper, we focus on learning distractor-aware Siamese networks for accurate and long-term tracking. To this end, features used in traditional Siamese trackers are analyzed at first. We observe that the imbalanced distribution of training data makes the learned features less discriminative. During the off-line training phase, an effective sampling strategy is introduced to control this distribution and make the model focus on the semantic distractors. During inference, a novel distractor-aware module is designed to perform incremental learning, which can effectively transfer the general embedding to the current video domain. In addition, we extend the proposed approach for long-term tracking by introducing a simple yet effective local-to-global search region strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, yielding 9.6% relative gain in VOT2016 dataset and 35.9% relative gain in UAV20L dataset. The proposed tracker can perform at 160 FPS on short-term benchmarks and 110 FPS on long-term benchmarks.

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is vital for many applications including autonomous driving vehicles and service robots. With the commonly used tracking-by-detection paradigm, 3D MOT has made important progress in recent years. However, these methods only use the detection boxes of the current frame to obtain trajectory-box association results, which makes it impossible for the tracker to recover objects missed by the detector. In this paper, we present TrajectoryFormer, a novel point-cloud-based 3D MOT framework. To recover the missed object by detector, we generates multiple trajectory hypotheses with hybrid candidate boxes, including temporally predicted boxes and current-frame detection boxes, for trajectory-box association. The predicted boxes can propagate object's history trajectory information to the current frame and thus the network can tolerate short-term miss detection of the tracked objects. We combine long-term object motion feature and short-term object appearance feature to create per-hypothesis feature embedding, which reduces the computational overhead for spatial-temporal encoding. Additionally, we introduce a Global-Local Interaction Module to conduct information interaction among all hypotheses and models their spatial relations, leading to accurate estimation of hypotheses. Our TrajectoryFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo 3D MOT benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/poodarchu/EFG .

We introduce an approach for detecting and tracking detailed 3D poses of multiple people from a single monocular camera stream. Our system maintains temporally coherent predictions in crowded scenes filled with difficult poses and occlusions. Our model performs both strong per-frame detection and a learned pose update to track people from frame to frame. Rather than match detections across time, poses are updated directly from a new input image, which enables online tracking through occlusion. We train on numerous image and video datasets leveraging pseudo-labeled annotations to produce a model that matches state-of-the-art systems in 3D pose estimation accuracy while being faster and more accurate in tracking multiple people through time. Code and weights are provided at https://github.com/apple/ml-comotion

The high temporal variation of the point clouds is the key challenge of 3D single-object tracking (3D SOT). Existing approaches rely on the assumption that the shape variation of the point clouds and the motion of the objects across neighboring frames are smooth, failing to cope with high temporal variation data. In this paper, we present a novel framework for 3D SOT in point clouds with high temporal variation, called HVTrack. HVTrack proposes three novel components to tackle the challenges in the high temporal variation scenario: 1) A Relative-Pose-Aware Memory module to handle temporal point cloud shape variations; 2) a Base-Expansion Feature Cross-Attention module to deal with similar object distractions in expanded search areas; 3) a Contextual Point Guided Self-Attention module for suppressing heavy background noise. We construct a dataset with high temporal variation (KITTI-HV) by setting different frame intervals for sampling in the KITTI dataset. On the KITTI-HV with 5 frame intervals, our HVTrack surpasses the state-of-the-art tracker CXTracker by 11.3%/15.7% in Success/Precision.

Transformer-based visual trackers have demonstrated significant progress owing to their superior modeling capabilities. However, existing trackers are hampered by low speed, limiting their applicability on devices with limited computational power. To alleviate this problem, we propose HiT, a new family of efficient tracking models that can run at high speed on different devices while retaining high performance. The central idea of HiT is the Bridge Module, which bridges the gap between modern lightweight transformers and the tracking framework. The Bridge Module incorporates the high-level information of deep features into the shallow large-resolution features. In this way, it produces better features for the tracking head. We also propose a novel dual-image position encoding technique that simultaneously encodes the position information of both the search region and template images. The HiT model achieves promising speed with competitive performance. For instance, it runs at 61 frames per second (fps) on the Nvidia Jetson AGX edge device. Furthermore, HiT attains 64.6% AUC on the LaSOT benchmark, surpassing all previous efficient trackers.

Comprehensive and consistent dynamic scene understanding from camera input is essential for advanced autonomous systems. Traditional camera-based perception tasks like 3D object tracking and semantic occupancy prediction lack either spatial comprehensiveness or temporal consistency. In this work, we introduce a brand-new task, Camera-based 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking, which simultaneously addresses panoptic occupancy segmentation and object tracking from camera-only input. Furthermore, we propose TrackOcc, a cutting-edge approach that processes image inputs in a streaming, end-to-end manner with 4D panoptic queries to address the proposed task. Leveraging the localization-aware loss, TrackOcc enhances the accuracy of 4D panoptic occupancy tracking without bells and whistles. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo dataset. The source code will be released at https://github.com/Tsinghua-MARS-Lab/TrackOcc.

We present a simple, self-supervised approach to the Tracking Any Point (TAP) problem. We train a global matching transformer to find cycle consistent tracks through video via contrastive random walks, using the transformer's attention-based global matching to define the transition matrices for a random walk on a space-time graph. The ability to perform "all pairs" comparisons between points allows the model to obtain high spatial precision and to obtain a strong contrastive learning signal, while avoiding many of the complexities of recent approaches (such as coarse-to-fine matching). To do this, we propose a number of design decisions that allow global matching architectures to be trained through self-supervision using cycle consistency. For example, we identify that transformer-based methods are sensitive to shortcut solutions, and propose a data augmentation scheme to address them. Our method achieves strong performance on the TapVid benchmarks, outperforming previous self-supervised tracking methods, such as DIFT, and is competitive with several supervised methods.

Monocular 3D tracking aims to capture the long-term motion of pixels in 3D space from a single monocular video and has witnessed rapid progress in recent years. However, we argue that the existing monocular 3D tracking methods still fall short in separating the camera motion from foreground dynamic motion and cannot densely track newly emerging dynamic subjects in the videos. To address these two limitations, we propose TrackingWorld, a novel pipeline for dense 3D tracking of almost all pixels within a world-centric 3D coordinate system. First, we introduce a tracking upsampler that efficiently lifts the arbitrary sparse 2D tracks into dense 2D tracks. Then, to generalize the current tracking methods to newly emerging objects, we apply the upsampler to all frames and reduce the redundancy of 2D tracks by eliminating the tracks in overlapped regions. Finally, we present an efficient optimization-based framework to back-project dense 2D tracks into world-centric 3D trajectories by estimating the camera poses and the 3D coordinates of these 2D tracks. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our system achieves accurate and dense 3D tracking in a world-centric coordinate frame.

Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) capabilities to operate reliably in dynamic environments. MOT ensures consistent object identity assignment and precise spatial delineation. Recent advances in foundation models, such as SAM2, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization for video segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS (MOT+Segmentation) remains limited by insufficient identity management and memory efficiency. This work introduces Seg2Track-SAM2, a framework that integrates pre-trained object detectors with SAM2 and a novel Seg2Track module to address track initialization, track management, and reinforcement. The proposed approach requires no fine-tuning and remains detector-agnostic. Experimental results on KITTI MOT and KITTI MOTS benchmarks show that Seg2Track-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, ranking fourth overall in both car and pedestrian classes on KITTI MOTS, while establishing a new benchmark in association accuracy (AssA). Furthermore, a sliding-window memory strategy reduces memory usage by up to 75% with negligible performance degradation, supporting deployment under resource constraints. These results confirm that Seg2Track-SAM2 advances MOTS by combining robust zero-shot tracking, enhanced identity preservation, and efficient memory utilization. The code is available at https://github.com/hcmr-lab/Seg2Track-SAM2

This work proposes the Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM) to learn real-world pixel dynamicity for visual tracking. LBM decomposes visual representations into dynamic pixel lattices and solves pixel motion states through collision-streaming processes. Specifically, the high-dimensional distribution of the target pixels is acquired through a multilayer predict-update network to estimate the pixel positions and visibility. The predict stage formulates lattice collisions among the spatial neighborhood of target pixels and develops lattice streaming within the temporal visual context. The update stage rectifies the pixel distributions with online visual representations. Compared with existing methods, LBM demonstrates practical applicability in an online and real-time manner, which can efficiently adapt to real-world visual tracking tasks. Comprehensive evaluations of real-world point tracking benchmarks such as TAP-Vid and RoboTAP validate LBM's efficiency. A general evaluation of large-scale open-world object tracking benchmarks such as TAO, BFT, and OVT-B further demonstrates LBM's real-world practicality.

Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.

Despite great progress in multimodal tracking, these trackers remain too heavy and expensive for resource-constrained devices. To alleviate this problem, we propose LightFC-X, a family of lightweight convolutional RGB-X trackers that explores a unified convolutional architecture for lightweight multimodal tracking. Our core idea is to achieve lightweight cross-modal modeling and joint refinement of the multimodal features and the spatiotemporal appearance features of the target. Specifically, we propose a novel efficient cross-attention module (ECAM) and a novel spatiotemporal template aggregation module (STAM). The ECAM achieves lightweight cross-modal interaction of template-search area integrated feature with only 0.08M parameters. The STAM enhances the model's utilization of temporal information through module fine-tuning paradigm. Comprehensive experiments show that our LightFC-X achieves state-of-the-art performance and the optimal balance between parameters, performance, and speed. For example, LightFC-T-ST outperforms CMD by 4.3% and 5.7% in SR and PR on the LasHeR benchmark, which it achieves 2.6x reduction in parameters and 2.7x speedup. It runs in real-time on the CPU at a speed of 22 fps. The code is available at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/LightFC-X.

This paper aims for high-performance offline LiDAR-based 3D object detection. We first observe that experienced human annotators annotate objects from a track-centric perspective. They first label the objects with clear shapes in a track, and then leverage the temporal coherence to infer the annotations of obscure objects. Drawing inspiration from this, we propose a high-performance offline detector in a track-centric perspective instead of the conventional object-centric perspective. Our method features a bidirectional tracking module and a track-centric learning module. Such a design allows our detector to infer and refine a complete track once the object is detected at a certain moment. We refer to this characteristic as "onCe detecTed, neveR Lost" and name the proposed system CTRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method, surpassing the human-level annotating accuracy and the previous state-of-the-art methods in the highly competitive Waymo Open Dataset without model ensemble. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.

Trackers and video generators solve closely related problems: the former analyze motion, while the latter synthesize it. We show that this connection enables pretrained video diffusion models to perform zero-shot point tracking by simply prompting them to visually mark points as they move over time. We place a distinctively colored marker at the query point, then regenerate the rest of the video from an intermediate noise level. This propagates the marker across frames, tracing the point's trajectory. To ensure that the marker remains visible in this counterfactual generation, despite such markers being unlikely in natural videos, we use the unedited initial frame as a negative prompt. Through experiments with multiple image-conditioned video diffusion models, we find that these "emergent" tracks outperform those of prior zero-shot methods and persist through occlusions, often obtaining performance that is competitive with specialized self-supervised models.

Multi-target multi-camera tracking is a crucial task that involves identifying and tracking individuals over time using video streams from multiple cameras. This task has practical applications in various fields, such as visual surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, and anomaly detection. However, due to the difficulty and cost of collecting and labeling data, existing datasets for this task are either synthetically generated or artificially constructed within a controlled camera network setting, which limits their ability to model real-world dynamics and generalize to diverse camera configurations. To address this issue, we present MTMMC, a real-world, large-scale dataset that includes long video sequences captured by 16 multi-modal cameras in two different environments - campus and factory - across various time, weather, and season conditions. This dataset provides a challenging test-bed for studying multi-camera tracking under diverse real-world complexities and includes an additional input modality of spatially aligned and temporally synchronized RGB and thermal cameras, which enhances the accuracy of multi-camera tracking. MTMMC is a super-set of existing datasets, benefiting independent fields such as person detection, re-identification, and multiple object tracking. We provide baselines and new learning setups on this dataset and set the reference scores for future studies. The datasets, models, and test server will be made publicly available.

Most existing multi-object tracking methods typically learn visual tracking features via maximizing dis-similarities of different instances and minimizing similarities of the same instance. While such a feature learning scheme achieves promising performance, learning discriminative features solely based on visual information is challenging especially in case of environmental interference such as occlusion, blur and domain variance. In this work, we argue that multi-modal language-driven features provide complementary information to classical visual features, thereby aiding in improving the robustness to such environmental interference. To this end, we propose a new multi-object tracking framework, named LG-MOT, that explicitly leverages language information at different levels of granularity (scene-and instance-level) and combines it with standard visual features to obtain discriminative representations. To develop LG-MOT, we annotate existing MOT datasets with scene-and instance-level language descriptions. We then encode both instance-and scene-level language information into high-dimensional embeddings, which are utilized to guide the visual features during training. At inference, our LG-MOT uses the standard visual features without relying on annotated language descriptions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, MOT17, DanceTrack and SportsMOT, reveal the merits of the proposed contributions leading to state-of-the-art performance. On the DanceTrack test set, our LG-MOT achieves an absolute gain of 2.2\% in terms of target object association (IDF1 score), compared to the baseline using only visual features. Further, our LG-MOT exhibits strong cross-domain generalizability. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/WesLee88524/LG-MOT.

Dynamic 3D reconstruction and point tracking in videos are typically treated as separate tasks, despite their deep connection. We propose St4RTrack, a feed-forward framework that simultaneously reconstructs and tracks dynamic video content in a world coordinate frame from RGB inputs. This is achieved by predicting two appropriately defined pointmaps for a pair of frames captured at different moments. Specifically, we predict both pointmaps at the same moment, in the same world, capturing both static and dynamic scene geometry while maintaining 3D correspondences. Chaining these predictions through the video sequence with respect to a reference frame naturally computes long-range correspondences, effectively combining 3D reconstruction with 3D tracking. Unlike prior methods that rely heavily on 4D ground truth supervision, we employ a novel adaptation scheme based on a reprojection loss. We establish a new extensive benchmark for world-frame reconstruction and tracking, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our unified, data-driven framework. Our code, model, and benchmark will be released.

Most state-of-the-art trackers adopt one-stream paradigm, using a single Vision Transformer for joint feature extraction and relation modeling of template and search region images. However, relation modeling between different image patches exhibits significant variations. For instance, background regions dominated by target-irrelevant information require reduced attention allocation, while foreground, particularly boundary areas, need to be be emphasized. A single model may not effectively handle all kinds of relation modeling simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker called SPMTrack based on mixture-of-experts tailored for visual tracking task (TMoE), combining the capability of multiple experts to handle diverse relation modeling more flexibly. Benefiting from TMoE, we extend relation modeling from image pairs to spatio-temporal context, further improving tracking accuracy with minimal increase in model parameters. Moreover, we employ TMoE as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, substantially reducing trainable parameters, which enables us to train SPMTrack of varying scales efficiently and preserve the generalization ability of pretrained models to achieve superior performance. We conduct experiments on seven datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/SPMTrack.

Event-based cameras (EBCs) have emerged as a bio-inspired alternative to traditional cameras, offering advantages in power efficiency, temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, the development of image analysis methods for EBCs is challenging due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the data. This work addresses the problem of object detection for EBC cameras. The current approaches to EBC object detection focus on constructing complex data representations and rely on specialized architectures. We introduce I2EvDet (Image-to-Event Detection), a novel adaptation framework that bridges mainstream object detection with temporal event data processing. First, we demonstrate that a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer, or RT-DETR, a state-of-the-art natural image detector, trained on a simple image-like representation of the EBC data achieves performance comparable to specialized EBC methods. Next, as part of our framework, we develop an efficient adaptation technique that transforms image-based detectors into event-based detection models by modifying their frozen latent representation space through minimal architectural additions. The resulting EvRT-DETR model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmark datasets Gen1 (mAP +2.3) and 1Mpx/Gen4 (mAP +1.4). These results demonstrate a fundamentally new approach to EBC object detection through principled adaptation of mainstream architectures, offering an efficient alternative with potential applications to other temporal visual domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/realtime-intelligence/evrt-detr

This paper addresses the long-standing challenge of reconstructing 3D structures from videos with dynamic content. Current approaches to this problem were not designed to operate on casual videos recorded by standard cameras or require a long optimization time. Aiming to significantly improve the efficiency of previous approaches, we present TracksTo4D, a learning-based approach that enables inferring 3D structure and camera positions from dynamic content originating from casual videos using a single efficient feed-forward pass. To achieve this, we propose operating directly over 2D point tracks as input and designing an architecture tailored for processing 2D point tracks. Our proposed architecture is designed with two key principles in mind: (1) it takes into account the inherent symmetries present in the input point tracks data, and (2) it assumes that the movement patterns can be effectively represented using a low-rank approximation. TracksTo4D is trained in an unsupervised way on a dataset of casual videos utilizing only the 2D point tracks extracted from the videos, without any 3D supervision. Our experiments show that TracksTo4D can reconstruct a temporal point cloud and camera positions of the underlying video with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while drastically reducing runtime by up to 95\%. We further show that TracksTo4D generalizes well to unseen videos of unseen semantic categories at inference time.

We present DINO-Tracker -- a new framework for long-term dense tracking in video. The pillar of our approach is combining test-time training on a single video, with the powerful localized semantic features learned by a pre-trained DINO-ViT model. Specifically, our framework simultaneously adopts DINO's features to fit to the motion observations of the test video, while training a tracker that directly leverages the refined features. The entire framework is trained end-to-end using a combination of self-supervised losses, and regularization that allows us to retain and benefit from DINO's semantic prior. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on known benchmarks. DINO-tracker significantly outperforms self-supervised methods and is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised trackers, while outperforming them in challenging cases of tracking under long-term occlusions.

Object modeling has become a core part of recent tracking frameworks. Current popular tackers use Transformer attention to extract the template feature separately or interactively with the search region. However, separate template learning lacks communication between the template and search regions, which brings difficulty in extracting discriminative target-oriented features. On the other hand, interactive template learning produces hybrid template features, which may introduce potential distractors to the template via the cluttered search regions. To enjoy the merits of both methods, we propose a robust object modeling framework for visual tracking (ROMTrack), which simultaneously models the inherent template and the hybrid template features. As a result, harmful distractors can be suppressed by combining the inherent features of target objects with search regions' guidance. Target-related features can also be extracted using the hybrid template, thus resulting in a more robust object modeling framework. To further enhance robustness, we present novel variation tokens to depict the ever-changing appearance of target objects. Variation tokens are adaptable to object deformation and appearance variations, which can boost overall performance with negligible computation. Experiments show that our ROMTrack sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack_{BB} for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack_{BB} manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack_{BB} is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.

Several unsupervised and self-supervised approaches have been developed in recent years to learn visual features from large-scale unlabeled datasets. Their main drawback however is that these methods are hardly able to recognize visual features of the same object if it is simply rotated or the perspective of the camera changes. To overcome this limitation and at the same time exploit a useful source of supervision, we take into account video object tracks. Following the intuition that two patches in a track should have similar visual representations in a learned feature space, we adopt an unsupervised clustering-based approach and constrain such representations to be labeled as the same category since they likely belong to the same object or object part. Experimental results on two downstream tasks on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our Online Deep Clustering with Video Track Consistency (ODCT) approach compared to prior work, which did not leverage temporal information. In addition we show that exploiting an unsupervised class-agnostic, yet noisy, track generator yields to better accuracy compared to relying on costly and precise track annotations.

Cross-view multi-object tracking aims to link objects between frames and camera views with substantial overlaps. Although cross-view multi-object tracking has received increased attention in recent years, existing datasets still have several issues, including 1) missing real-world scenarios, 2) lacking diverse scenes, 3) owning a limited number of tracks, 4) comprising only static cameras, and 5) lacking standard benchmarks, which hinder the investigation and comparison of cross-view tracking methods. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce DIVOTrack: a new cross-view multi-object tracking dataset for DIVerse Open scenes with dense tracking pedestrians in realistic and non-experimental environments. Our DIVOTrack has ten distinct scenarios and 550 cross-view tracks, surpassing all cross-view multi-object tracking datasets currently available. Furthermore, we provide a novel baseline cross-view tracking method with a unified joint detection and cross-view tracking framework named CrossMOT, which learns object detection, single-view association, and cross-view matching with an all-in-one embedding model. Finally, we present a summary of current methodologies and a set of standard benchmarks with our DIVOTrack to provide a fair comparison and conduct a comprehensive analysis of current approaches and our proposed CrossMOT. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/shengyuhao/DIVOTrack.

Recovering dense and long-range pixel motion in videos is a challenging problem. Part of the difficulty arises from the 3D-to-2D projection process, leading to occlusions and discontinuities in the 2D motion domain. While 2D motion can be intricate, we posit that the underlying 3D motion can often be simple and low-dimensional. In this work, we propose to estimate point trajectories in 3D space to mitigate the issues caused by image projection. Our method, named SpatialTracker, lifts 2D pixels to 3D using monocular depth estimators, represents the 3D content of each frame efficiently using a triplane representation, and performs iterative updates using a transformer to estimate 3D trajectories. Tracking in 3D allows us to leverage as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) constraints while simultaneously learning a rigidity embedding that clusters pixels into different rigid parts. Extensive evaluation shows that our approach achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance both qualitatively and quantitatively, particularly in challenging scenarios such as out-of-plane rotation.

Most state-of-the-art point trackers are trained on synthetic data due to the difficulty of annotating real videos for this task. However, this can result in suboptimal performance due to the statistical gap between synthetic and real videos. In order to understand these issues better, we introduce CoTracker3, comprising a new tracking model and a new semi-supervised training recipe. This allows real videos without annotations to be used during training by generating pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf teachers. The new model eliminates or simplifies components from previous trackers, resulting in a simpler and often smaller architecture. This training scheme is much simpler than prior work and achieves better results using 1,000 times less data. We further study the scaling behaviour to understand the impact of using more real unsupervised data in point tracking. The model is available in online and offline variants and reliably tracks visible and occluded points.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the problem of tracking the state of an unknown and time-varying number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications such as autonomous driving, tracking animal behavior, defense systems, and others. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been increasingly used in MOT for improving tracking performance, but mostly in settings where the measurements are high-dimensional and there are no available models of the measurement likelihood and the object dynamics. The model-based setting instead has not attracted as much attention, and it is still unclear if DL methods can outperform traditional model-based Bayesian methods, which are the state of the art (SOTA) in this context. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based DL tracker and evaluate its performance in the model-based setting, comparing it to SOTA model-based Bayesian methods in a variety of different tasks. Our results show that the proposed DL method can match the performance of the model-based methods in simple tasks, while outperforming them when the task gets more complicated, either due to an increase in the data association complexity, or to stronger nonlinearities of the models of the environment.

Recovering 4D from monocular video, which jointly estimates dynamic geometry and camera poses, is an inevitably challenging problem. While recent pointmap-based 3D reconstruction methods (e.g., DUSt3R) have made great progress in reconstructing static scenes, directly applying them to dynamic scenes leads to inaccurate results. This discrepancy arises because moving objects violate multi-view geometric constraints, disrupting the reconstruction. To address this, we introduce C4D, a framework that leverages temporal Correspondences to extend existing 3D reconstruction formulation to 4D. Specifically, apart from predicting pointmaps, C4D captures two types of correspondences: short-term optical flow and long-term point tracking. We train a dynamic-aware point tracker that provides additional mobility information, facilitating the estimation of motion masks to separate moving elements from the static background, thus offering more reliable guidance for dynamic scenes. Furthermore, we introduce a set of dynamic scene optimization objectives to recover per-frame 3D geometry and camera parameters. Simultaneously, the correspondences lift 2D trajectories into smooth 3D trajectories, enabling fully integrated 4D reconstruction. Experiments show that our framework achieves complete 4D recovery and demonstrates strong performance across multiple downstream tasks, including depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and point tracking. Project Page: https://littlepure2333.github.io/C4D

We present a deeply integrated method of exploiting low-cost gyroscopes to improve general purpose feature tracking. Most previous methods use gyroscopes to initialize and bound the search for features. In contrast, we use them to regularize the tracking energy function so that they can directly assist in the tracking of ambiguous and poor-quality features. We demonstrate that our simple technique offers significant improvements in performance over conventional template-based tracking methods, and is in fact competitive with more complex and computationally expensive state-of-the-art trackers, but at a fraction of the computational cost. Additionally, we show that the practice of initializing template-based feature trackers like KLT (Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi) using gyro-predicted optical flow offers no advantage over using a careful optical-only initialization method, suggesting that some deeper level of integration, like the method we propose, is needed in order to realize a genuine improvement in tracking performance from these inertial sensors.