Daily Papers

Significant advancements have been made in video generative models recently. Unlike image generation, video generation presents greater challenges, requiring not only generating high-quality frames but also ensuring temporal consistency across these frames. Despite the impressive progress, research on metrics for evaluating the quality of generated videos, especially concerning temporal and motion consistency, remains underexplored. To bridge this research gap, we propose Fr\'echet Video Motion Distance (FVMD) metric, which focuses on evaluating motion consistency in video generation. Specifically, we design explicit motion features based on key point tracking, and then measure the similarity between these features via the Fr\'echet distance. We conduct sensitivity analysis by injecting noise into real videos to verify the effectiveness of FVMD. Further, we carry out a large-scale human study, demonstrating that our metric effectively detects temporal noise and aligns better with human perceptions of generated video quality than existing metrics. Additionally, our motion features can consistently improve the performance of Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models, indicating that our approach is also applicable to unary video quality evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/ljh0v0/FMD-frechet-motion-distance.

Tracking any point (TAP) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, requiring high precision and long-term motion reasoning. Recent attempts to combine RGB frames and event streams have shown promise, yet they typically rely on synchronous or non-adaptive fusion, leading to temporal misalignment and severe degradation when one modality fails. We introduce TAPFormer, a transformer-based framework that performs asynchronous temporal-consistent fusion of frames and events for robust and high-frequency arbitrary point tracking. Our key innovation is a Transient Asynchronous Fusion (TAF) mechanism, which explicitly models the temporal evolution between discrete frames through continuous event updates, bridging the gap between low-rate frames and high-rate events. In addition, a Cross-modal Locally Weighted Fusion (CLWF) module adaptively adjusts spatial attention according to modality reliability, yielding stable and discriminative features even under blur or low light. To evaluate our approach under realistic conditions, we construct a novel real-world frame-event TAP dataset under diverse illumination and motion conditions. Our method outperforms existing point trackers, achieving a 28.2% improvement in average pixel error within threshold. Moreover, on standard point tracking benchmarks, our tracker consistently achieves the best performance. Project website: tapformer.github.io

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.

In this paper, we present TAPTRv2, a Transformer-based approach built upon TAPTR for solving the Tracking Any Point (TAP) task. TAPTR borrows designs from DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and formulates each tracking point as a point query, making it possible to leverage well-studied operations in DETR-like algorithms. TAPTRv2 improves TAPTR by addressing a critical issue regarding its reliance on cost-volume,which contaminates the point query\'s content feature and negatively impacts both visibility prediction and cost-volume computation. In TAPTRv2, we propose a novel attention-based position update (APU) operation and use key-aware deformable attention to realize. For each query, this operation uses key-aware attention weights to combine their corresponding deformable sampling positions to predict a new query position. This design is based on the observation that local attention is essentially the same as cost-volume, both of which are computed by dot-production between a query and its surrounding features. By introducing this new operation, TAPTRv2 not only removes the extra burden of cost-volume computation, but also leads to a substantial performance improvement. TAPTRv2 surpasses TAPTR and achieves state-of-the-art performance on many challenging datasets, demonstrating the superiority

Drag-Based Image Editing (DBIE), which allows users to manipulate images by directly dragging objects within them, has recently attracted much attention from the community. However, it faces two key challenges: (\textcolor{magenta{i}}) point-based drag is often highly ambiguous and difficult to align with users' intentions; (\textcolor{magenta{ii}}) current DBIE methods primarily rely on alternating between motion supervision and point tracking, which is not only cumbersome but also fails to produce high-quality results. These limitations motivate us to explore DBIE from a new perspective -- redefining it as deformation, rotation, and translation of user-specified handle regions. Thereby, by requiring users to explicitly specify both drag areas and types, we can effectively address the ambiguity issue. Furthermore, we propose a simple-yet-effective editing framework, dubbed SkyBlue{DragNeXt}. It unifies DBIE as a Latent Region Optimization (LRO) problem and solves it through Progressive Backward Self-Intervention (PBSI), simplifying the overall procedure of DBIE while further enhancing quality by fully leveraging region-level structure information and progressive guidance from intermediate drag states. We validate SkyBlue{DragNeXt} on our NextBench, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly outperform existing approaches. Code will be released on github.

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.

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.

Automated tracking of surgical tool keypoints in robotic surgery videos is an essential task for various downstream use cases such as skill assessment, expertise assessment, and the delineation of safety zones. In recent years, the explosion of deep learning for vision applications has led to many works in surgical instrument segmentation, while lesser focus has been on tracking specific tool keypoints, such as tool tips. In this work, we propose a novel, multi-frame context-driven deep learning framework to localize and track tool keypoints in surgical videos. We train and test our models on the annotated frames from the 2015 EndoVis Challenge dataset, resulting in state-of-the-art performance. By leveraging sophisticated deep learning models and multi-frame context, we achieve 90\% keypoint detection accuracy and a localization RMS error of 5.27 pixels. Results on a self-annotated JIGSAWS dataset with more challenging scenarios also show that the proposed multi-frame models can accurately track tool-tip and tool-base keypoints, with {<}4.2-pixel RMS error overall. Such a framework paves the way for accurately tracking surgical instrument keypoints, enabling further downstream use cases. Project and dataset webpage: https://tinyurl.com/mfc-tracker

Extracting informative representations from videos is fundamental for effectively learning various downstream tasks. We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of meaningful representations from videos, leveraging the concept of image spatial entropy (ISE) that quantifies the per-pixel information in an image. We argue that local entropy of pixel neighborhoods and their temporal evolution create valuable intrinsic supervisory signals for learning prominent features. Building on this idea, we abstract visual features into a concise representation of keypoints that act as dynamic information transmitters, and design a deep learning model that learns, purely unsupervised, spatially and temporally consistent representations directly from video frames. Two original information-theoretic losses, computed from local entropy, guide our model to discover consistent keypoint representations; a loss that maximizes the spatial information covered by the keypoints and a loss that optimizes the keypoints' information transportation over time. We compare our keypoint representation to strong baselines for various downstream tasks, \eg, learning object dynamics. Our empirical results show superior performance for our information-driven keypoints that resolve challenges like attendance to static and dynamic objects or objects abruptly entering and leaving the scene.

Three-dimensional objects are commonly represented as 3D boxes in a point-cloud. This representation mimics the well-studied image-based 2D bounding-box detection but comes with additional challenges. Objects in a 3D world do not follow any particular orientation, and box-based detectors have difficulties enumerating all orientations or fitting an axis-aligned bounding box to rotated objects. In this paper, we instead propose to represent, detect, and track 3D objects as points. Our framework, CenterPoint, first detects centers of objects using a keypoint detector and regresses to other attributes, including 3D size, 3D orientation, and velocity. In a second stage, it refines these estimates using additional point features on the object. In CenterPoint, 3D object tracking simplifies to greedy closest-point matching. The resulting detection and tracking algorithm is simple, efficient, and effective. CenterPoint achieved state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark for both 3D detection and tracking, with 65.5 NDS and 63.8 AMOTA for a single model. On the Waymo Open Dataset, CenterPoint outperforms all previous single model method by a large margin and ranks first among all Lidar-only submissions. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tianweiy/CenterPoint.

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/

Robot manipulation relying on learned object-centric descriptors became popular in recent years. Visual descriptors can easily describe manipulation task objectives, they can be learned efficiently using self-supervision, and they can encode actuated and even non-rigid objects. However, learning robust, view-invariant keypoints in a self-supervised approach requires a meticulous data collection approach involving precise calibration and expert supervision. In this paper we introduce Cycle-Correspondence Loss (CCL) for view-invariant dense descriptor learning, which adopts the concept of cycle-consistency, enabling a simple data collection pipeline and training on unpaired RGB camera views. The key idea is to autonomously detect valid pixel correspondences by attempting to use a prediction over a new image to predict the original pixel in the original image, while scaling error terms based on the estimated confidence. Our evaluation shows that we outperform other self-supervised RGB-only methods, and approach performance of supervised methods, both with respect to keypoint tracking as well as for a robot grasping downstream task.

This paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions and establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet.

We introduce a self-supervised method for learning visual correspondence from unlabeled video. The main idea is to use cycle-consistency in time as free supervisory signal for learning visual representations from scratch. At training time, our model learns a feature map representation to be useful for performing cycle-consistent tracking. At test time, we use the acquired representation to find nearest neighbors across space and time. We demonstrate the generalizability of the representation -- without finetuning -- across a range of visual correspondence tasks, including video object segmentation, keypoint tracking, and optical flow. Our approach outperforms previous self-supervised methods and performs competitively with strongly supervised methods.

Video generative models (VGMs) pretrained on large-scale internet data can produce temporally coherent rollout videos that capture rich object dynamics, offering a compelling foundation for zero-shot robotic manipulation. However, VGMs often produce physically implausible rollouts, and converting their pixel-space motion into robot actions through geometric retargeting further introduces cumulative errors from imperfect depth estimation and keypoint tracking. To address these challenges, we present , a data-free framework that aligns VGM outputs with compositional constraints generated by vision-language models (VLMs) at inference time. The key insight is that VLMs offer a capability complementary to VGMs: structured spatial reasoning that can identify the physical constraints critical to the success and safety of manipulation execution. Given a language instruction, uses a VLM to automatically extract a set of compositional constraints capturing task-specific requirements, which are then applied at two stages: (1) constraint-guided rollout selection, which scores and filters a batch of VGM rollouts to retain the most physically plausible candidate, and (2) constraint-based trajectory optimization, which uses the selected rollout as initialization and refines the robot trajectory under the same constraint set to correct retargeting errors. We evaluate on six real-robot manipulation tasks requiring precise, constraint-sensitive execution, improving the overall success rate by 43.3\% points over the strongest baseline without any task-specific training data.

We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis.Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline.We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video.With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field.We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training.More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog.Project page can be found at https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/.

Point tracking aims to follow visual points through complex motion, occlusion, and viewpoint changes, and has advanced rapidly with modern foundation models. Yet progress toward general point tracking remains constrained by limited high-quality data, as existing datasets often provide insufficient diversity and imperfect trajectory annotations. To this end, we introduce SynthVerse, a large-scale, diverse synthetic dataset specifically designed for point tracking. SynthVerse includes several new domains and object types missing from existing synthetic datasets, such as animated-film-style content, embodied manipulation, scene navigation, and articulated objects. SynthVerse substantially expands dataset diversity by covering a broader range of object categories and providing high-quality dynamic motions and interactions, enabling more robust training and evaluation for general point tracking. In addition, we establish a highly diverse point tracking benchmark to systematically evaluate state-of-the-art methods under broader domain shifts. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that training with SynthVerse yields consistent improvements in generalization and reveal limitations of existing trackers under diverse settings.

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.

Video editing is a challenging task that requires manipulating videos on both the spatial and temporal dimensions. Existing methods for video editing mainly focus on changing the appearance or style of the objects in the video, while keeping their structures unchanged. However, there is no existing method that allows users to interactively ``drag'' any points of instances on the first frame to precisely reach the target points with other frames consistently deformed. In this paper, we propose a new diffusion-based method for interactive point-based video manipulation, called Drag-A-Video. Our method allows users to click pairs of handle points and target points as well as masks on the first frame of an input video. Then, our method transforms the inputs into point sets and propagates these sets across frames. To precisely modify the contents of the video, we employ a new video-level motion supervision to update the features of the video and introduce the latent offsets to achieve this update at multiple denoising timesteps. We propose a temporal-consistent point tracking module to coordinate the movement of the points in the handle point sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our method on various videos. The website of our work is available here: https://drag-a-video.github.io/.

Keypoint detection & descriptors are foundational tech-nologies for computer vision tasks like image matching, 3D reconstruction and visual odometry. Hand-engineered methods like Harris corners, SIFT, and HOG descriptors have been used for decades; more recently, there has been a trend to introduce learning in an attempt to improve keypoint detectors. On inspection however, the results are difficult to interpret; recent learning-based methods employ a vast diversity of experimental setups and design choices: empirical results are often reported using different backbones, protocols, datasets, types of supervisions or tasks. Since these differences are often coupled together, it raises a natural question on what makes a good learned keypoint detector. In this work, we revisit the design of existing keypoint detectors by deconstructing their methodologies and identifying the key components. We re-design each component from first-principle and propose Simple Learned Keypoints (SiLK) that is fully-differentiable, lightweight, and flexible. Despite its simplicity, SiLK advances new state-of-the-art on Detection Repeatability and Homography Estimation tasks on HPatches and 3D Point-Cloud Registration task on ScanNet, and achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation in 2022 Image Matching Challenge and ScanNet.

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

Dense point tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications ranging from video analysis to robotic manipulation. State-of-the-art trackers typically rely on cost volumes to match features across frames, but this approach incurs quadratic complexity in spatial resolution, limiting scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose \method, a novel dense point tracker that eschews cost volumes in favor of warping. Inspired by recent advances in optical flow, our approach iteratively refines track estimates by warping features from the target frame to the query frame based on the current estimate. Combined with a transformer architecture that performs joint spatiotemporal reasoning across all tracks, our design establishes long-range correspondences without computing feature correlations. Our model is simple and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard dense point tracking benchmarks, including TAP-Vid-DAVIS, TAP-Vid-Kinetics, and Robo-TAP. Remarkably, the model also excels at optical flow, sometimes outperforming specialized methods on the Sintel, KITTI, and Spring benchmarks. These results suggest that warping-based architectures can unify dense point tracking and optical flow estimation.

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.

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.

Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking (APT) is a critical task in detecting and monitoring the keypoints of animals across a series of video frames, which is essential for understanding animal behavior. Past works relating to animals have primarily focused on either animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation only, neglecting the integration of both aspects. The absence of comprehensive APT datasets inhibits the progression and evaluation of animal pose estimation and tracking methods based on videos, thereby constraining their real-world applications. To fill this gap, we introduce APTv2, the pioneering large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. APTv2 comprises 2,749 video clips filtered and collected from 30 distinct animal species. Each video clip includes 15 frames, culminating in a total of 41,235 frames. Following meticulous manual annotation and stringent verification, we provide high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations for a total of 84,611 animal instances, split into easy and hard subsets based on the number of instances that exists in the frame. With APTv2 as the foundation, we establish a simple baseline method named \posetrackmethodname and provide benchmarks for representative models across three tracks: (1) single-frame animal pose estimation track to evaluate both intra- and inter-domain transfer learning performance, (2) low-data transfer and generalization track to evaluate the inter-species domain generalization performance, and (3) animal pose tracking track. Our experimental results deliver key empirical insights, demonstrating that APTv2 serves as a valuable benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. It also presents new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2{https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2}.

Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting real-world applications, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. Specifically, APT-36K consists of 2,400 video clips collected and filtered from 30 animal species with 15 frames for each video, resulting in 36,000 frames in total. After manual annotation and careful double-check, high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations are provided for all the animal instances. Based on APT-36K, we benchmark several representative models on the following three tracks: (1) supervised animal pose estimation on a single frame under intra- and inter-domain transfer learning settings, (2) inter-species domain generalization test for unseen animals, and (3) animal pose estimation with animal tracking. Based on the experimental results, we gain some empirical insights and show that APT-36K provides a valuable animal pose estimation and tracking benchmark, offering new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/pandorgan/APT-36K.

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.

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.

With the immense growth of dataset sizes and computing resources in recent years, so-called foundation models have become popular in NLP and vision tasks. In this work, we propose to explore foundation models for the task of keypoint detection on 3D shapes. A unique characteristic of keypoint detection is that it requires semantic and geometric awareness while demanding high localization accuracy. To address this problem, we propose, first, to back-project features from large pre-trained 2D vision models onto 3D shapes and employ them for this task. We show that we obtain robust 3D features that contain rich semantic information and analyze multiple candidate features stemming from different 2D foundation models. Second, we employ a keypoint candidate optimization module which aims to match the average observed distribution of keypoints on the shape and is guided by the back-projected features. The resulting approach achieves a new state of the art for few-shot keypoint detection on the KeyPointNet dataset, almost doubling the performance of the previous best methods.

Keypoint-based representation has proven advantageous in various visual and robotic tasks. However, the existing 2D and 3D methods for detecting keypoints mainly rely on geometric consistency to achieve spatial alignment, neglecting temporal consistency. To address this issue, the Transporter method was introduced for 2D data, which reconstructs the target frame from the source frame to incorporate both spatial and temporal information. However, the direct application of the Transporter to 3D point clouds is infeasible due to their structural differences from 2D images. Thus, we propose the first 3D version of the Transporter, which leverages hybrid 3D representation, cross attention, and implicit reconstruction. We apply this new learning system on 3D articulated objects and nonrigid animals (humans and rodents) and show that learned keypoints are spatio-temporally consistent. Additionally, we propose a closed-loop control strategy that utilizes the learned keypoints for 3D object manipulation and demonstrate its superior performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhongcl-thu/3D-Implicit-Transporter.

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.

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.

Video generation models are rapidly improving in their ability to synthesize human actions in novel contexts, holding the potential to serve as high-level planners for contextual robot control. To realize this potential, a key research question remains open: how can a humanoid execute the human actions from generated videos in a zero-shot manner? This challenge arises because generated videos are often noisy and exhibit morphological distortions that make direct imitation difficult compared to real video. To address this, we introduce a two-stage pipeline. First, we lift video pixels into a 4D human representation and then retarget to the humanoid morphology. Second, we propose GenMimic-a physics-aware reinforcement learning policy conditioned on 3D keypoints, and trained with symmetry regularization and keypoint-weighted tracking rewards. As a result, GenMimic can mimic human actions from noisy, generated videos. We curate GenMimicBench, a synthetic human-motion dataset generated using two video generation models across a spectrum of actions and contexts, establishing a benchmark for assessing zero-shot generalization and policy robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate improvements over strong baselines in simulation and confirm coherent, physically stable motion tracking on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot without fine-tuning. This work offers a promising path to realizing the potential of video generation models as high-level policies for robot control.

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

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.

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 .

Video understanding requires effective modeling of both motion and appearance information, particularly for few-shot action recognition. While recent advances in point tracking have been shown to improve few-shot action recognition, two fundamental challenges persist: selecting informative points to track and effectively modeling their motion patterns. We present Trokens, a novel approach that transforms trajectory points into semantic-aware relational tokens for action recognition. First, we introduce a semantic-aware sampling strategy to adaptively distribute tracking points based on object scale and semantic relevance. Second, we develop a motion modeling framework that captures both intra-trajectory dynamics through the Histogram of Oriented Displacements (HoD) and inter-trajectory relationships to model complex action patterns. Our approach effectively combines these trajectory tokens with semantic features to enhance appearance features with motion information, achieving state-of-the-art performance across six diverse few-shot action recognition benchmarks: Something-Something-V2 (both full and small splits), Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51, and FineGym. For project page see https://trokens-iccv25.github.io

We introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://pointodyssey.com

Long-term point tracking is essential to understand non-rigid motion in the physical world better. Deep learning approaches have recently been incorporated into long-term point tracking, but most prior work predominantly functions in 2D. Although these methods benefit from the well-established backbones and matching frameworks, the motions they produce do not always make sense in the 3D physical world. In this paper, we propose the first deep learning framework for long-term point tracking in 3D that generalizes to new points and videos without requiring test-time fine-tuning. Our model contains a cost volume fusion module that effectively integrates multiple past appearances and motion information via a transformer architecture, significantly enhancing overall tracking performance. In terms of 3D tracking performance, our model significantly outperforms simple scene flow chaining and previous 2D point tracking methods, even if one uses ground truth depth and camera pose to backproject 2D point tracks in a synthetic scenario.

Accurate motion estimation for tracking deformable tissues in echocardiography is essential for precise cardiac function measurements. While traditional methods like block matching or optical flow struggle with intricate cardiac motion, modern point tracking approaches remain largely underexplored in this domain. This work investigates the potential of state-of-the-art (SOTA) point tracking methods for ultrasound, with a focus on echocardiography. Although these novel approaches demonstrate strong performance in general videos, their effectiveness and generalizability in echocardiography remain limited. By analyzing cardiac motion throughout the heart cycle in real B-mode ultrasound videos, we identify that a directional motion bias across different views is affecting the existing training strategies. To mitigate this, we refine the training procedure and incorporate a set of tailored augmentations to reduce the bias and enhance tracking robustness and generalization through impartial cardiac motion. We also propose a lightweight network leveraging multi-scale cost volumes from spatial context alone to challenge the advanced spatiotemporal point tracking models. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our strategies significantly improves models' performances over their baselines, even for out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. For instance, EchoTracker boosts overall position accuracy by 60.7% and reduces median trajectory error by 61.5% across heart cycle phases. Interestingly, several point tracking models fail to outperform our proposed simple model in terms of tracking accuracy and generalization, reflecting their limitations when applied to echocardiography. Nevertheless, clinical evaluation reveals that these methods improve GLS measurements, aligning more closely with expert-validated, semi-automated tools and thus demonstrating better reproducibility in real-world applications.

Tracking any point based on image frames is constrained by frame rates, leading to instability in high-speed scenarios and limited generalization in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose an image-event fusion point tracker, FE-TAP, which combines the contextual information from image frames with the high temporal resolution of events, achieving high frame rate and robust point tracking under various challenging conditions. Specifically, we designed an Evolution Fusion module (EvoFusion) to model the image generation process guided by events. This module can effectively integrate valuable information from both modalities operating at different frequencies. To achieve smoother point trajectories, we employed a transformer-based refinement strategy that updates the point's trajectories and features iteratively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly improving expected feature age by 24% on EDS datasets. Finally, we qualitatively validated the robustness of our algorithm in real driving scenarios using our custom-designed high-resolution image-event synchronization device. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/ljx1002/FE-TAP.

Existing multi-camera solutions for automatic scorekeeping in steel-tip darts are very expensive and thus inaccessible to most players. Motivated to develop a more accessible low-cost solution, we present a new approach to keypoint detection and apply it to predict dart scores from a single image taken from any camera angle. This problem involves detecting multiple keypoints that may be of the same class and positioned in close proximity to one another. The widely adopted framework for regressing keypoints using heatmaps is not well-suited for this task. To address this issue, we instead propose to model keypoints as objects. We develop a deep convolutional neural network around this idea and use it to predict dart locations and dartboard calibration points within an overall pipeline for automatic dart scoring, which we call DeepDarts. Additionally, we propose several task-specific data augmentation strategies to improve the generalization of our method. As a proof of concept, two datasets comprising 16k images originating from two different dartboard setups were manually collected and annotated to evaluate the system. In the primary dataset containing 15k images captured from a face-on view of the dartboard using a smartphone, DeepDarts predicted the total score correctly in 94.7% of the test images. In a second more challenging dataset containing limited training data (830 images) and various camera angles, we utilize transfer learning and extensive data augmentation to achieve a test accuracy of 84.0%. Because DeepDarts relies only on single images, it has the potential to be deployed on edge devices, giving anyone with a smartphone access to an automatic dart scoring system for steel-tip darts. The code and datasets are available.

This paper proposes a new method to infer keypoints from arbitrary object categories in practical scenarios where point cloud data (PCD) are noisy, down-sampled and arbitrarily rotated. Our proposed model adheres to the following principles: i) keypoints inference is fully unsupervised (no annotation given), ii) keypoints position error should be low and resilient to PCD perturbations (robustness), iii) keypoints should not change their indexes for the intra-class objects (semantic coherence), iv) keypoints should be close to or proximal to PCD surface (compactness). We achieve these desiderata by proposing a new self-supervised training strategy for keypoints estimation that does not assume any a priori knowledge of the object class, and a model architecture with coupled auxiliary losses that promotes the desired keypoints properties. We compare the keypoints estimated by the proposed approach with those of the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. The experiments show that our approach outperforms by estimating keypoints with improved coverage (+9.41%) while being semantically consistent (+4.66%) that best characterizes the object's 3D shape for downstream tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/IITPAVIS/SC3K

Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.

We propose a keypoint-based object-level SLAM framework that can provide globally consistent 6DoF pose estimates for symmetric and asymmetric objects alike. To the best of our knowledge, our system is among the first to utilize the camera pose information from SLAM to provide prior knowledge for tracking keypoints on symmetric objects -- ensuring that new measurements are consistent with the current 3D scene. Moreover, our semantic keypoint network is trained to predict the Gaussian covariance for the keypoints that captures the true error of the prediction, and thus is not only useful as a weight for the residuals in the system's optimization problems, but also as a means to detect harmful statistical outliers without choosing a manual threshold. Experiments show that our method provides competitive performance to the state of the art in 6DoF object pose estimation, and at a real-time speed. Our code, pre-trained models, and keypoint labels are available https://github.com/rpng/suo_slam.

Existing methods detect the keypoints in a non-differentiable way, therefore they can not directly optimize the position of keypoints through back-propagation. To address this issue, we present a partially differentiable keypoint detection module, which outputs accurate sub-pixel keypoints. The reprojection loss is then proposed to directly optimize these sub-pixel keypoints, and the dispersity peak loss is presented for accurate keypoints regularization. We also extract the descriptors in a sub-pixel way, and they are trained with the stable neural reprojection error loss. Moreover, a lightweight network is designed for keypoint detection and descriptor extraction, which can run at 95 frames per second for 640x480 images on a commercial GPU. On homography estimation, camera pose estimation, and visual (re-)localization tasks, the proposed method achieves equivalent performance with the state-of-the-art approaches, while greatly reduces the inference time.

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.

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.

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 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.

In this paper, we address the challenge of making ViT models more robust to unseen affine transformations. Such robustness becomes useful in various recognition tasks such as face recognition when image alignment failures occur. We propose a novel method called KP-RPE, which leverages key points (e.g.~facial landmarks) to make ViT more resilient to scale, translation, and pose variations. We begin with the observation that Relative Position Encoding (RPE) is a good way to bring affine transform generalization to ViTs. RPE, however, can only inject the model with prior knowledge that nearby pixels are more important than far pixels. Keypoint RPE (KP-RPE) is an extension of this principle, where the significance of pixels is not solely dictated by their proximity but also by their relative positions to specific keypoints within the image. By anchoring the significance of pixels around keypoints, the model can more effectively retain spatial relationships, even when those relationships are disrupted by affine transformations. We show the merit of KP-RPE in face and gait recognition. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness in improving face recognition performance from low-quality images, particularly where alignment is prone to failure. Code and pre-trained models are available.

Detection identifies objects as axis-aligned boxes in an image. Most successful object detectors enumerate a nearly exhaustive list of potential object locations and classify each. This is wasteful, inefficient, and requires additional post-processing. In this paper, we take a different approach. We model an object as a single point --- the center point of its bounding box. Our detector uses keypoint estimation to find center points and regresses to all other object properties, such as size, 3D location, orientation, and even pose. Our center point based approach, CenterNet, is end-to-end differentiable, simpler, faster, and more accurate than corresponding bounding box based detectors. CenterNet achieves the best speed-accuracy trade-off on the MS COCO dataset, with 28.1% AP at 142 FPS, 37.4% AP at 52 FPS, and 45.1% AP with multi-scale testing at 1.4 FPS. We use the same approach to estimate 3D bounding box in the KITTI benchmark and human pose on the COCO keypoint dataset. Our method performs competitively with sophisticated multi-stage methods and runs in real-time.

Markerless multiview motion capture is often constrained by the need for precise camera calibration, limiting accessibility for non-experts and in-the-wild captures. Existing calibration-free approaches mitigate this requirement but suffer from high computational cost and reduced reconstruction accuracy. We present Kineo, a fully automatic, calibration-free pipeline for markerless motion capture from videos captured by unsynchronized, uncalibrated, consumer-grade RGB cameras. Kineo leverages 2D keypoints from off-the-shelf detectors to simultaneously calibrate cameras, including Brown-Conrady distortion coefficients, and reconstruct 3D keypoints and dense scene point maps at metric scale. A confidence-driven spatio-temporal keypoint sampling strategy, combined with graph-based global optimization, ensures robust calibration at a fixed computational cost independent of sequence length. We further introduce a pairwise reprojection consensus score to quantify 3D reconstruction reliability for downstream tasks. Evaluations on EgoHumans and Human3.6M demonstrate substantial improvements over prior calibration-free methods. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, Kineo reduces camera translation error by approximately 83-85%, camera angular error by 86-92%, and world mean-per-joint error (W-MPJPE) by 83-91%. Kineo is also efficient in real-world scenarios, processing multi-view sequences faster than their duration in specific configuration (e.g., 36min to process 1h20min of footage). The full pipeline and evaluation code are openly released to promote reproducibility and practical adoption at https://liris-xr.github.io/kineo/.

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.

We present an approach that uses a multi-camera system to train fine-grained detectors for keypoints that are prone to occlusion, such as the joints of a hand. We call this procedure multiview bootstrapping: first, an initial keypoint detector is used to produce noisy labels in multiple views of the hand. The noisy detections are then triangulated in 3D using multiview geometry or marked as outliers. Finally, the reprojected triangulations are used as new labeled training data to improve the detector. We repeat this process, generating more labeled data in each iteration. We derive a result analytically relating the minimum number of views to achieve target true and false positive rates for a given detector. The method is used to train a hand keypoint detector for single images. The resulting keypoint detector runs in realtime on RGB images and has accuracy comparable to methods that use depth sensors. The single view detector, triangulated over multiple views, enables 3D markerless hand motion capture with complex object interactions.

Recent advances in foundational 3D reconstruction models, such as DUSt3R and MASt3R, have shown great potential in 2D and 3D correspondence in static scenes. In this paper, we propose to adapt them for the task of point tracking through 3D grounded correspondence. We first demonstrate that these models are competitive point trackers when focusing on static points, present in current point tracking benchmarks (+33.5% on EgoPoints vs. CoTracker2). We propose to combine the reconstruction loss with training for dynamic correspondence along with a visibility head, and fine-tuning MASt3R for point tracking using a relatively small amount of synthetic data. Importantly, we only train and evaluate on pairs of frames where one contains the query point, effectively removing any temporal context. Using a mix of dynamic and static point correspondences, we achieve competitive or superior point tracking results on four datasets (e.g. competitive on TAP-Vid-DAVIS 73.8 δ_{avg} / 85.8\% occlusion acc. for PointSt3R compared to 75.7 / 88.3\% for CoTracker2; and significantly outperform CoTracker3 on EgoPoints 61.3 vs 54.2 and RGB-S 87.0 vs 82.8). We also present results on 3D point tracking along with several ablations on training datasets and percentage of dynamic correspondences.

This work addresses the challenge of sub-pixel accuracy in detecting 2D local features, a cornerstone problem in computer vision. Despite the advancements brought by neural network-based methods like SuperPoint and ALIKED, these modern approaches lag behind classical ones such as SIFT in keypoint localization accuracy due to their lack of sub-pixel precision. We propose a novel network that enhances any detector with sub-pixel precision by learning an offset vector for detected features, thereby eliminating the need for designing specialized sub-pixel accurate detectors. This optimization directly minimizes test-time evaluation metrics like relative pose error. Through extensive testing with both nearest neighbors matching and the recent LightGlue matcher across various real-world datasets, our method consistently outperforms existing methods in accuracy. Moreover, it adds only around 7 ms to the time of a particular detector. The code is available at https://github.com/KimSinjeong/keypt2subpx .

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.

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.

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.

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.

We present a fast bottom-up method that jointly detects over 100 keypoints on humans or objects, also referred to as human/object pose estimation. We model all keypoints belonging to a human or an object -- the pose -- as a graph and leverage insights from community detection to quantify the independence of keypoints. We use a graph centrality measure to assign training weights to different parts of a pose. Our proposed measure quantifies how tightly a keypoint is connected to its neighborhood. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all previous methods for human pose estimation with fine-grained keypoint annotations on the face, the hands and the feet with a total of 133 keypoints. We also show that our method generalizes to car poses.

Towards 3D object tracking in point clouds, a novel point-to-box network termed P2B is proposed in an end-to-end learning manner. Our main idea is to first localize potential target centers in 3D search area embedded with target information. Then point-driven 3D target proposal and verification are executed jointly. In this way, the time-consuming 3D exhaustive search can be avoided. Specifically, we first sample seeds from the point clouds in template and search area respectively. Then, we execute permutation-invariant feature augmentation to embed target clues from template into search area seeds and represent them with target-specific features. Consequently, the augmented search area seeds regress the potential target centers via Hough voting. The centers are further strengthened with seed-wise targetness scores. Finally, each center clusters its neighbors to leverage the ensemble power for joint 3D target proposal and verification. We apply PointNet++ as our backbone and experiments on KITTI tracking dataset demonstrate P2B's superiority (~10%'s improvement over state-of-the-art). Note that P2B can run with 40FPS on a single NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/HaozheQi/P2B.

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.

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.

Animal tracking and pose estimation systems, such as STEP (Simultaneous Tracking and Pose Estimation) and ViTPose, experience substantial performance drops when processing images and videos with cage structures and systematic occlusions. We present a three-stage preprocessing pipeline that addresses this limitation through: (1) cage segmentation using a Gabor-enhanced ResNet-UNet architecture with tunable orientation filters, (2) cage inpainting using CRFill for content-aware reconstruction of occluded regions, and (3) evaluation of pose estimation and tracking on the uncaged frames. Our Gabor-enhanced segmentation model leverages orientation-aware features with 72 directional kernels to accurately identify and segment cage structures that severely impair the performance of existing methods. Experimental validation demonstrates that removing cage occlusions through our pipeline enables pose estimation and tracking performance comparable to that in environments without occlusions. We also observe significant improvements in keypoint detection accuracy and trajectory consistency.

This work proposes a unified framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any articulated (e.g., human and animal), rigid, and soft objects via visual or textual prompts for fine-grained vision understanding and manipulation. Keypoint is a structure-aware, pixel-level, and compact representation of any object, especially articulated objects. Existing fine-grained promptable tasks mainly focus on object instance detection and segmentation but often fail to identify fine-grained granularity and structured information of image and instance, such as eyes, leg, paw, etc. Meanwhile, prompt-based keypoint detection is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we make the first attempt to develop an end-to-end prompt-based keypoint detection framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any objects. As keypoint detection tasks are unified in this framework, we can leverage 13 keypoint detection datasets with 338 keypoints across 1,237 categories over 400K instances to train a generic keypoint detection model. UniPose can effectively align text-to-keypoint and image-to-keypoint due to the mutual enhancement of textual and visual prompts based on the cross-modality contrastive learning optimization objectives. Our experimental results show that UniPose has strong fine-grained localization and generalization abilities across image styles, categories, and poses. Based on UniPose as a generalist keypoint detector, we hope it could serve fine-grained visual perception, understanding, and generation.

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.

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.

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is a long-standing problem in the computer vision community, which aims to reconstruct the camera poses and 3D structure of a scene from a set of unconstrained 2D images. Classical frameworks solve this problem in an incremental manner by detecting and matching keypoints, registering images, triangulating 3D points, and conducting bundle adjustment. Recent research efforts have predominantly revolved around harnessing the power of deep learning techniques to enhance specific elements (e.g., keypoint matching), but are still based on the original, non-differentiable pipeline. Instead, we propose a new deep pipeline VGGSfM, where each component is fully differentiable and thus can be trained in an end-to-end manner. To this end, we introduce new mechanisms and simplifications. First, we build on recent advances in deep 2D point tracking to extract reliable pixel-accurate tracks, which eliminates the need for chaining pairwise matches. Furthermore, we recover all cameras simultaneously based on the image and track features instead of gradually registering cameras. Finally, we optimise the cameras and triangulate 3D points via a differentiable bundle adjustment layer. We attain state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets, CO3D, IMC Phototourism, and ETH3D.

Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT

Interactive video object segmentation is a crucial video task, having various applications from video editing to data annotating. However, current approaches struggle to accurately segment objects across diverse domains. Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) introduces interactive visual prompts and demonstrates impressive performance across different domains. In this paper, we propose a training-free prompt tracking framework for interactive video object segmentation (I-PT), leveraging the powerful generalization of SAM. Although point tracking efficiently captures the pixel-wise information of objects in a video, points tend to be unstable when tracked over a long period, resulting in incorrect segmentation. Towards fast and robust interaction, we jointly adopt sparse points and boxes tracking, filtering out unstable points and capturing object-wise information. To better integrate reference information from multiple interactions, we introduce a cross-round space-time module (CRSTM), which adaptively aggregates mask features from previous rounds and frames, enhancing the segmentation stability. Our framework has demonstrated robust zero-shot video segmentation results on popular VOS datasets with interaction types, including DAVIS 2017, YouTube-VOS 2018, and MOSE 2023, maintaining a good tradeoff between performance and interaction time.

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

Models for long-term point tracking are typically trained on large synthetic datasets. The performance of these models degrades in real-world videos due to different characteristics and the absence of dense ground-truth annotations. Self-training on unlabeled videos has been explored as a practical solution, but the quality of pseudo-labels strongly depends on the reliability of teacher models, which vary across frames and scenes. In this paper, we address the problem of real-world fine-tuning and introduce verifier, a meta-model that learns to assess the reliability of tracker predictions and guide pseudo-label generation. Given candidate trajectories from multiple pretrained trackers, the verifier evaluates them per frame and selects the most trustworthy predictions, resulting in high-quality pseudo-label trajectories. When applied for fine-tuning, verifier-guided pseudo-labeling substantially improves the quality of supervision and enables data-efficient adaptation to unlabeled videos. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results while requiring less data than prior self-training methods. Project page: https://kuis-ai.github.io/track_on_r

Tissue tracking in echocardiography is challenging due to the complex cardiac motion and the inherent nature of ultrasound acquisitions. Although optical flow methods are considered state-of-the-art (SOTA), they struggle with long-range tracking, noise occlusions, and drift throughout the cardiac cycle. Recently, novel learning-based point tracking techniques have been introduced to tackle some of these issues. In this paper, we build upon these techniques and introduce EchoTracker, a two-fold coarse-to-fine model that facilitates the tracking of queried points on a tissue surface across ultrasound image sequences. The architecture contains a preliminary coarse initialization of the trajectories, followed by reinforcement iterations based on fine-grained appearance changes. It is efficient, light, and can run on mid-range GPUs. Experiments demonstrate that the model outperforms SOTA methods, with an average position accuracy of 67% and a median trajectory error of 2.86 pixels. Furthermore, we show a relative improvement of 25% when using our model to calculate the global longitudinal strain (GLS) in a clinical test-retest dataset compared to other methods. This implies that learning-based point tracking can potentially improve performance and yield a higher diagnostic and prognostic value for clinical measurements than current techniques. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/riponazad/echotracker/.

Performance analyses based on videos are commonly used by coaches of athletes in various sports disciplines. In individual sports, these analyses mainly comprise the body posture. This paper focuses on the disciplines of triple, high, and long jump, which require fine-grained locations of the athlete's body. Typical human pose estimation datasets provide only a very limited set of keypoints, which is not sufficient in this case. Therefore, we propose a method to detect arbitrary keypoints on the whole body of the athlete by leveraging the limited set of annotated keypoints and auto-generated segmentation masks of body parts. Evaluations show that our model is capable of detecting keypoints on the head, torso, hands, feet, arms, and legs, including also bent elbows and knees. We analyze and compare different techniques to encode desired keypoints as the model's input and their embedding for the Transformer backbone.

Multi-view 3D geometry networks offer a powerful prior but are prohibitively slow for real-time applications. We propose a novel way to adapt them for online use, enabling real-time 6-DoF pose tracking and online reconstruction of objects and scenes from monocular RGB videos. Our method rapidly selects and manages a set of images as keyframes to map a scene or object via π^3 with full bidirectional attention. We then cache the global self-attention block's key-value (KV) pairs and use them as the sole scene representation for online tracking. This allows for up to 15times speedup during inference without the fear of drift or catastrophic forgetting. Our caching strategy is model-agnostic and can be applied to other off-the-shelf multi-view networks without retraining. We demonstrate KV-Tracker on both scene-level tracking and the more challenging task of on-the-fly object tracking and reconstruction without depth measurements or object priors. Experiments on the TUM RGB-D, 7-Scenes, Arctic and OnePose datasets show the strong performance of our system while maintaining high frame-rates up to {sim}27 FPS.

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.

Current Human Pose Estimation methods have achieved significant improvements. However, state-of-the-art models ignore out-of-image keypoints and use uncalibrated heatmaps as keypoint location representations. To address these limitations, we propose ProbPose, which predicts for each keypoint: a calibrated probability of keypoint presence at each location in the activation window, the probability of being outside of it, and its predicted visibility. To address the lack of evaluation protocols for out-of-image keypoints, we introduce the CropCOCO dataset and the Extended OKS (Ex-OKS) metric, which extends OKS to out-of-image points. Tested on COCO, CropCOCO, and OCHuman, ProbPose shows significant gains in out-of-image keypoint localization while also improving in-image localization through data augmentation. Additionally, the model improves robustness along the edges of the bounding box and offers better flexibility in keypoint evaluation. The code and models are available on https://mirapurkrabek.github.io/ProbPose/ for research purposes.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a rising topic in video processing technologies and has important application value in consumer electronics. Currently, tracking-by-detection (TBD) is the dominant paradigm for MOT, which performs target detection and association frame by frame. However, the association performance of TBD methods degrades in complex scenes with heavy occlusions, which hinders the application of such methods in real-world scenarios.To this end, we incorporate pseudo-depth cues to enhance the association performance and propose Pseudo-Depth SORT (PD-SORT). First, we extend the Kalman filter state vector with pseudo-depth states. Second, we introduce a novel depth volume IoU (DVIoU) by combining the conventional 2D IoU with pseudo-depth. Furthermore, we develop a quantized pseudo-depth measurement (QPDM) strategy for more robust data association. Besides, we also integrate camera motion compensation (CMC) to handle dynamic camera situations. With the above designs, PD-SORT significantly alleviates the occlusion-induced ambiguous associations and achieves leading performances on DanceTrack, MOT17, and MOT20. Note that the improvement is especially obvious on DanceTrack, where objects show complex motions, similar appearances, and frequent occlusions. The code is available at https://github.com/Wangyc2000/PD_SORT.

Accurate depth estimation from monocular videos remains challenging due to ambiguities inherent in single-view geometry, as crucial depth cues like stereopsis are absent. However, humans often perceive relative depth intuitively by observing variations in the size and spacing of objects as they move. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method that infers relative depth by examining the spatial relationships and temporal evolution of a set of tracked 2D trajectories. Specifically, we use off-the-shelf point tracking models to capture 2D trajectories. Then, our approach employs spatial and temporal transformers to process these trajectories and directly infer depth changes over time. Evaluated on the TAPVid-3D benchmark, our method demonstrates robust zero-shot performance, generalizing effectively from synthetic to real-world datasets. Results indicate that our approach achieves temporally smooth, high-accuracy depth predictions across diverse domains.

Interest point detection and local feature description are fundamental steps in many computer vision applications. Classical methods for these tasks are based on a detect-then-describe paradigm where separate handcrafted methods are used to first identify repeatable keypoints and then represent them with a local descriptor. Neural networks trained with metric learning losses have recently caught up with these techniques, focusing on learning repeatable saliency maps for keypoint detection and learning descriptors at the detected keypoint locations. In this work, we argue that salient regions are not necessarily discriminative, and therefore can harm the performance of the description. Furthermore, we claim that descriptors should be learned only in regions for which matching can be performed with high confidence. We thus propose to jointly learn keypoint detection and description together with a predictor of the local descriptor discriminativeness. This allows us to avoid ambiguous areas and leads to reliable keypoint detections and descriptions. Our detection-and-description approach, trained with self-supervision, can simultaneously output sparse, repeatable and reliable keypoints that outperforms state-of-the-art detectors and descriptors on the HPatches dataset. It also establishes a record on the recently released Aachen Day-Night localization dataset.

To endow models with greater understanding of physics and motion, it is useful to enable them to perceive how solid surfaces move and deform in real scenes. This can be formalized as Tracking-Any-Point (TAP), which requires the algorithm to be able to track any point corresponding to a solid surface in a video, potentially densely in space and time. Large-scale ground-truth training data for TAP is only available in simulation, which currently has limited variety of objects and motion. In this work, we demonstrate how large-scale, unlabeled, uncurated real-world data can improve a TAP model with minimal architectural changes, using a self-supervised student-teacher setup. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the TAP-Vid benchmark surpassing previous results by a wide margin: for example, TAP-Vid-DAVIS performance improves from 61.3% to 66.4%, and TAP-Vid-Kinetics from 57.2% to 61.5%.

Generating human motion with precise spatial control is a challenging problem. Existing approaches often require task-specific training or slow optimization, and enforcing hard constraints frequently disrupts motion naturalness. Building on the observation that many animation tasks can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, we introduce ProjFlow, a training-free sampler that achieves zero-shot, exact satisfaction of linear spatial constraints while preserving motion realism. Our key advance is a novel kinematics-aware metric that encodes skeletal topology. This metric allows the sampler to enforce hard constraints by distributing corrections coherently across the entire skeleton, avoiding the unnatural artifacts of naive projection. Furthermore, for sparse inputs, such as filling in long gaps between a few keyframes, we introduce a time-varying formulation using pseudo-observations that fade during sampling. Extensive experiments on representative applications, motion inpainting, and 2D-to-3D lifting, demonstrate that ProjFlow achieves exact constraint satisfaction and matches or improves realism over zero-shot baselines, while remaining competitive with training-based controllers.

Video generation technologies are developing rapidly and have broad potential applications. Among these technologies, camera control is crucial for generating professional-quality videos that accurately meet user expectations. However, existing camera control methods still suffer from several limitations, including control precision and the neglect of the control for subject motion dynamics. In this work, we propose I2VControl-Camera, a novel camera control method that significantly enhances controllability while providing adjustability over the strength of subject motion. To improve control precision, we employ point trajectory in the camera coordinate system instead of only extrinsic matrix information as our control signal. To accurately control and adjust the strength of subject motion, we explicitly model the higher-order components of the video trajectory expansion, not merely the linear terms, and design an operator that effectively represents the motion strength. We use an adapter architecture that is independent of the base model structure. Experiments on static and dynamic scenes show that our framework outperformances previous methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The project page is: https://wanquanf.github.io/I2VControlCamera .

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.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has established itself as a powerful zero-shot image segmentation model, employing interactive prompts such as points to generate masks. This paper presents SAM-PT, a method extending SAM's capability to tracking and segmenting anything in dynamic videos. SAM-PT leverages robust and sparse point selection and propagation techniques for mask generation, demonstrating that a SAM-based segmentation tracker can yield strong zero-shot performance across popular video object segmentation benchmarks, including DAVIS, YouTube-VOS, and MOSE. Compared to traditional object-centric mask propagation strategies, we uniquely use point propagation to exploit local structure information that is agnostic to object semantics. We highlight the merits of point-based tracking through direct evaluation on the zero-shot open-world Unidentified Video Objects (UVO) benchmark. To further enhance our approach, we utilize K-Medoids clustering for point initialization and track both positive and negative points to clearly distinguish the target object. We also employ multiple mask decoding passes for mask refinement and devise a point re-initialization strategy to improve tracking accuracy. Our code integrates different point trackers and video segmentation benchmarks and will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/sam-pt.

To serve the intricate and varied demands of image editing, precise and flexible manipulation of image content is indispensable. Recently, DragGAN has achieved impressive editing results through point-based manipulation. However, we have observed that DragGAN struggles with miss tracking, where DragGAN encounters difficulty in effectively tracking the desired handle points, and ambiguous tracking, where the tracked points are situated within other regions that bear resemblance to the handle points. To deal with the above issues, we propose FreeDrag, which adopts a feature-oriented approach to free the burden on point tracking within the point-oriented methodology of DragGAN. The FreeDrag incorporates adaptive template features, line search, and fuzzy localization techniques to perform stable and efficient point-based image editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is superior to the DragGAN and enables stable point-based editing in challenging scenarios with similar structures, fine details, or under multi-point targets.

Group Activity Recognition aims to understand collective activities from videos. Existing solutions primarily rely on the RGB modality, which encounters challenges such as background variations, occlusions, motion blurs, and significant computational overhead. Meanwhile, current keypoint-based methods offer a lightweight and informative representation of human motions but necessitate accurate individual annotations and specialized interaction reasoning modules. To address these limitations, we design a panoramic graph that incorporates multi-person skeletons and objects to encapsulate group activity, offering an effective alternative to RGB video. This panoramic graph enables Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to unify intra-person, inter-person, and person-object interactive modeling through spatial-temporal graph convolutions. In practice, we develop a novel pipeline that extracts skeleton coordinates using pose estimation and tracking algorithms and employ Multi-person Panoramic GCN (MP-GCN) to predict group activities. Extensive experiments on Volleyball and NBA datasets demonstrate that the MP-GCN achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Notably, our method outperforms RGB-based approaches by using only estimated 2D keypoints as input. Code is available at https://github.com/mgiant/MP-GCN

Simultaneous localization and mapping is essential for position tracking and scene understanding. 3D Gaussian-based map representations enable photorealistic reconstruction and real-time rendering of scenes using multiple posed cameras. We show for the first time that using 3D Gaussians for map representation with unposed camera images and inertial measurements can enable accurate SLAM. Our method, MM3DGS, addresses the limitations of prior neural radiance field-based representations by enabling faster rendering, scale awareness, and improved trajectory tracking. Our framework enables keyframe-based mapping and tracking utilizing loss functions that incorporate relative pose transformations from pre-integrated inertial measurements, depth estimates, and measures of photometric rendering quality. We also release a multi-modal dataset, UT-MM, collected from a mobile robot equipped with a camera and an inertial measurement unit. Experimental evaluation on several scenes from the dataset shows that MM3DGS achieves 3x improvement in tracking and 5% improvement in photometric rendering quality compared to the current 3DGS SLAM state-of-the-art, while allowing real-time rendering of a high-resolution dense 3D map. Project Webpage: https://vita-group.github.io/MM3DGS-SLAM

Established sampling protocols for 3D point cloud learning, such as Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and Fixed Sample Size (FSS), have long been relied upon. However, real-world data often suffer from corruptions, such as sensor noise, which violates the benign data assumption in current protocols. As a result, these protocols are highly vulnerable to noise, posing significant safety risks in critical applications like autonomous driving. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced point cloud sampling protocol, PointSP, designed to improve robustness against point cloud corruptions. PointSP incorporates key point reweighting to mitigate outlier sensitivity and ensure the selection of representative points. It also introduces a local-global balanced downsampling strategy, which allows for scalable and adaptive sampling while maintaining geometric consistency. Additionally, a lightweight tangent plane interpolation method is used to preserve local geometry while enhancing the density of the point cloud. Unlike learning-based approaches that require additional model training, PointSP is architecture-agnostic, requiring no extra learning or modification to the network. This enables seamless integration into existing pipelines. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world corrupted datasets show that PointSP significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of point cloud classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.

Intraoperative registration of real-time ultrasound (iUS) to preoperative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) remains an unsolved problem due to severe modality-specific differences in appearance, resolution, and field-of-view. To address this, we propose a novel 3D cross-modal keypoint descriptor for MRI-iUS matching and registration. Our approach employs a patient-specific matching-by-synthesis approach, generating synthetic iUS volumes from preoperative MRI. This enables supervised contrastive training to learn a shared descriptor space. A probabilistic keypoint detection strategy is then employed to identify anatomically salient and modality-consistent locations. During training, a curriculum-based triplet loss with dynamic hard negative mining is used to learn descriptors that are i) robust to iUS artifacts such as speckle noise and limited coverage, and ii) rotation-invariant. At inference, the method detects keypoints in MR and real iUS images and identifies sparse matches, which are then used to perform rigid registration. Our approach is evaluated using 3D MRI-iUS pairs from the ReMIND dataset. Experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art keypoint matching methods across 11 patients, with an average precision of 69.8%. For image registration, our method achieves a competitive mean Target Registration Error of 2.39 mm on the ReMIND2Reg benchmark. Compared to existing iUS-MR registration approaches, our framework is interpretable, requires no manual initialization, and shows robustness to iUS field-of-view variation. Code, data and model weights are available at https://github.com/morozovdd/CrossKEY.

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.

Local feature detection is a key ingredient of many image processing and computer vision applications, such as visual odometry and localization. Most existing algorithms focus on feature detection from a sharp image. They would thus have degraded performance once the image is blurred, which could happen easily under low-lighting conditions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet both efficient and effective keypoint detection method that is able to accurately localize the salient keypoints in a blurred image. Our method takes advantages of a novel multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based architecture that significantly improve the detection repeatability for a blurred image. The network is also light-weight and able to run in real-time, which enables its deployment for time-constrained applications. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our detector is able to improve the detection repeatability with blurred images, while keeping comparable performance as existing state-of-the-art detectors for sharp images.

Tool tracking in surgical videos is essential for advancing computer-assisted interventions, such as skill assessment, safety zone estimation, and human-machine collaboration. However, the lack of context-rich datasets limits AI applications in this field. Existing datasets rely on overly generic tracking formalizations that fail to capture surgical-specific dynamics, such as tools moving out of the camera's view or exiting the body. This results in less clinically relevant trajectories and a lack of flexibility for real-world surgical applications. Methods trained on these datasets often struggle with visual challenges such as smoke, reflection, and bleeding, further exposing the limitations of current approaches. We introduce CholecTrack20, a specialized dataset for multi-class, multi-tool tracking in surgical procedures. It redefines tracking formalization with three perspectives: (i) intraoperative, (ii) intracorporeal, and (iii) visibility, enabling adaptable and clinically meaningful tool trajectories. The dataset comprises 20 full-length surgical videos, annotated at 1 fps, yielding over 35K frames and 65K labeled tool instances. Annotations include spatial location, category, identity, operator, phase, and scene visual challenge. Benchmarking state-of-the-art methods on CholecTrack20 reveals significant performance gaps, with current approaches (< 45\% HOTA) failing to meet the accuracy required for clinical translation. These findings motivate the need for advanced and intuitive tracking algorithms and establish CholecTrack20 as a foundation for developing robust AI-driven surgical assistance systems.

The two-stage object pose estimation paradigm first detects semantic keypoints on the image and then estimates the 6D pose by minimizing reprojection errors. Despite performing well on standard benchmarks, existing techniques offer no provable guarantees on the quality and uncertainty of the estimation. In this paper, we inject two fundamental changes, namely conformal keypoint detection and geometric uncertainty propagation, into the two-stage paradigm and propose the first pose estimator that endows an estimation with provable and computable worst-case error bounds. On one hand, conformal keypoint detection applies the statistical machinery of inductive conformal prediction to convert heuristic keypoint detections into circular or elliptical prediction sets that cover the groundtruth keypoints with a user-specified marginal probability (e.g., 90%). Geometric uncertainty propagation, on the other, propagates the geometric constraints on the keypoints to the 6D object pose, leading to a Pose UnceRtainty SEt (PURSE) that guarantees coverage of the groundtruth pose with the same probability. The PURSE, however, is a nonconvex set that does not directly lead to estimated poses and uncertainties. Therefore, we develop RANdom SAmple averaGing (RANSAG) to compute an average pose and apply semidefinite relaxation to upper bound the worst-case errors between the average pose and the groundtruth. On the LineMOD Occlusion dataset we demonstrate: (i) the PURSE covers the groundtruth with valid probabilities; (ii) the worst-case error bounds provide correct uncertainty quantification; and (iii) the average pose achieves better or similar accuracy as representative methods based on sparse keypoints.

This study demonstrates that incorporating a consistency heuristic into the point-matching algorithm yerebakan2023hierarchical improves robustness in matching anatomical locations across pairs of medical images. We validated our approach on diverse longitudinal internal and public datasets spanning CT and MRI modalities. Notably, it surpasses state-of-the-art results on the Deep Lesion Tracking dataset. Additionally, we show that the method effectively addresses landmark localization. The algorithm operates efficiently on standard CPU hardware and allows configurable trade-offs between speed and robustness. The method enables high-precision navigation between medical images without requiring a machine learning model or training data.

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.

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.

Structured representations such as keypoints are widely used in pose transfer, conditional image generation, animation, and 3D reconstruction. However, their supervised learning requires expensive annotation for each target domain. We propose a self-supervised method that learns to disentangle object structure from the appearance with a graph of 2D keypoints linked by straight edges. Both the keypoint location and their pairwise edge weights are learned, given only a collection of images depicting the same object class. The resulting graph is interpretable, for example, AutoLink recovers the human skeleton topology when applied to images showing people. Our key ingredients are i) an encoder that predicts keypoint locations in an input image, ii) a shared graph as a latent variable that links the same pairs of keypoints in every image, iii) an intermediate edge map that combines the latent graph edge weights and keypoint locations in a soft, differentiable manner, and iv) an inpainting objective on randomly masked images. Although simpler, AutoLink outperforms existing self-supervised methods on the established keypoint and pose estimation benchmarks and paves the way for structure-conditioned generative models on more diverse datasets. Project website: https://xingzhehe.github.io/autolink/.

Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, which is inefficient and time-consuming during postprocessing. In this paper, we propose a Global Association Network (GANet) to formulate the lane detection problem from a new perspective, where each keypoint is directly regressed to the starting point of the lane line instead of point-by-point extension. Concretely, the association of keypoints to their belonged lane line is conducted by predicting their offsets to the corresponding starting points of lanes globally without dependence on each other, which could be done in parallel to greatly improve efficiency. In addition, we further propose a Lane-aware Feature Aggregator (LFA), which adaptively captures the local correlations between adjacent keypoints to supplement local information to the global association. Extensive experiments on two popular lane detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms previous methods with F1 score of 79.63% on CULane and 97.71% on Tusimple dataset with high FPS. The code will be released at https://github.com/Wolfwjs/GANet.

The capacity of existing human keypoint localization models is limited by keypoint priors provided by the training data. To alleviate this restriction and pursue more general model, this work studies keypoint localization from a different perspective by reasoning locations based on keypiont clues in text descriptions. We propose LocLLM, the first Large-Language Model (LLM) based keypoint localization model that takes images and text instructions as inputs and outputs the desired keypoint coordinates. LocLLM leverages the strong reasoning capability of LLM and clues of keypoint type, location, and relationship in textual descriptions for keypoint localization. To effectively tune LocLLM, we construct localization-based instruction conversations to connect keypoint description with corresponding coordinates in input image, and fine-tune the whole model in a parameter-efficient training pipeline. LocLLM shows remarkable performance on standard 2D/3D keypoint localization benchmarks. Moreover, incorporating language clues into the localization makes LocLLM show superior flexibility and generalizable capability in cross dataset keypoint localization, and even detecting novel type of keypoints unseen during training.

Keypoint detection, integral to modern machine perception, faces challenges in few-shot learning, particularly when source data from the same distribution as the query is unavailable. This gap is addressed by leveraging sketches, a popular form of human expression, providing a source-free alternative. However, challenges arise in mastering cross-modal embeddings and handling user-specific sketch styles. Our proposed framework overcomes these hurdles with a prototypical setup, combined with a grid-based locator and prototypical domain adaptation. We also demonstrate success in few-shot convergence across novel keypoints and classes through extensive experiments.

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.

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.

End-to-end multi-modal planning is a promising paradigm in autonomous driving, enabling decision-making with diverse trajectory candidates. A key component is a robust trajectory scorer capable of selecting the optimal trajectory from these candidates. While recent trajectory scorers focus on scoring either large sets of static trajectories or small sets of dynamically generated ones, both approaches face significant limitations in generalization. Static vocabularies provide effective coarse discretization but struggle to make fine-grained adaptation, while dynamic proposals offer detailed precision but fail to capture broader trajectory distributions. To overcome these challenges, we propose GTRS (Generalized Trajectory Scoring), a unified framework for end-to-end multi-modal planning that combines coarse and fine-grained trajectory evaluation. GTRS consists of three complementary innovations: (1) a diffusion-based trajectory generator that produces diverse fine-grained proposals; (2) a vocabulary generalization technique that trains a scorer on super-dense trajectory sets with dropout regularization, enabling its robust inference on smaller subsets; and (3) a sensor augmentation strategy that enhances out-of-domain generalization while incorporating refinement training for critical trajectory discrimination. As the winning solution of the Navsim v2 Challenge, GTRS demonstrates superior performance even with sub-optimal sensor inputs, approaching privileged methods that rely on ground-truth perception. Code will be available at https://github.com/NVlabs/GTRS.

Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. This approach not only enables object pose generation based on arbitrary keypoint definitions but also significantly reduces the associated costs, paving the way for versatile and adaptable pose estimation applications. We present a novel approach to CAPE that leverages the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a newly designed Graph Transformer Decoder. By capturing and incorporating this crucial structural information, our method enhances the accuracy of keypoint localization, marking a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques that treat keypoints as isolated entities. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning more than 100 categories. Our method outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by substantial margins, achieving remarkable improvements of 2.16% and 1.82% under 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively. Furthermore, our method's end-to-end training demonstrates both scalability and efficiency compared to previous CAPE approaches.

Human perception for effective object tracking in a 2D video stream arises from the implicit use of prior 3D knowledge combined with semantic reasoning. In contrast, most generic object tracking (GOT) methods primarily rely on 2D features of the target and its surroundings while neglecting 3D geometric cues, which makes them susceptible to partial occlusion, distractors, and variations in geometry and appearance. To address this limitation, we introduce GOT-Edit, an online cross-modality model editing approach that integrates geometry-aware cues into a generic object tracker from a 2D video stream. Our approach leverages features from a pre-trained Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer to enable geometric cue inference from only a few 2D images. To tackle the challenge of seamlessly combining geometry and semantics, GOT-Edit performs online model editing with null-space constrained updates that incorporate geometric information while preserving semantic discrimination, yielding consistently better performance across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple GOT benchmarks demonstrate that GOT-Edit achieves superior robustness and accuracy, particularly under occlusion and clutter, establishing a new paradigm for combining 2D semantics with 3D geometric reasoning for generic object tracking.

We introduce TAPIP3D, a novel approach for long-term 3D point tracking in monocular RGB and RGB-D videos. TAPIP3D represents videos as camera-stabilized spatio-temporal feature clouds, leveraging depth and camera motion information to lift 2D video features into a 3D world space where camera motion is effectively canceled. TAPIP3D iteratively refines multi-frame 3D motion estimates within this stabilized representation, enabling robust tracking over extended periods. To manage the inherent irregularities of 3D point distributions, we propose a Local Pair Attention mechanism. This 3D contextualization strategy effectively exploits spatial relationships in 3D, forming informative feature neighborhoods for precise 3D trajectory estimation. Our 3D-centric approach significantly outperforms existing 3D point tracking methods and even enhances 2D tracking accuracy compared to conventional 2D pixel trackers when accurate depth is available. It supports inference in both camera coordinates (i.e., unstabilized) and world coordinates, and our results demonstrate that compensating for camera motion improves tracking performance. Our approach replaces the conventional 2D square correlation neighborhoods used in prior 2D and 3D trackers, leading to more robust and accurate results across various 3D point tracking benchmarks. Project Page: https://tapip3d.github.io

The growing demand for intelligent environments unleashes an extraordinary cycle of privacy-aware applications that makes individuals' life more comfortable and safe. Examples of these applications include pedestrian tracking systems in large areas. Although the ubiquity of camera-based systems, they are not a preferable solution due to the vulnerability of leaking the privacy of pedestrians. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving system for pedestrian tracking in smart environments using multiple distributed LiDARs of non-overlapping views. The system is designed to leverage LiDAR devices to track pedestrians in partially covered areas due to practical constraints, e.g., occlusion or cost. Therefore, the system uses the point cloud captured by different LiDARs to extract discriminative features that are used to train a metric learning model for pedestrian matching purposes. To boost the system's robustness, we leverage a probabilistic approach to model and adapt the dynamic mobility patterns of individuals and thus connect their sub-trajectories. We deployed the system in a large-scale testbed with 70 colorless LiDARs and conducted three different experiments. The evaluation result at the entrance hall confirms the system's ability to accurately track the pedestrians with a 0.98 F-measure even with zero-covered areas. This result highlights the promise of the proposed system as the next generation of privacy-preserving tracking means in smart environments.

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.

Fish tracking is a key technology for obtaining movement trajectories and identifying abnormal behavior. However, it faces considerable challenges, including occlusion, multi-scale tracking, and fish deformation. Notably, extant reviews have focused more on behavioral analysis rather than providing a comprehensive overview of computer vision-based fish tracking approaches. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the advancements of fish tracking technologies over the past seven years (2017-2023). It explores diverse fish tracking techniques with an emphasis on fundamental localization and tracking methods. Auxiliary plugins commonly integrated into fish tracking systems, such as underwater image enhancement and re-identification, are also examined. Additionally, this paper summarizes open-source datasets, evaluation metrics, challenges, and applications in fish tracking research. Finally, a comprehensive discussion offers insights and future directions for vision-based fish tracking techniques. We hope that our work could provide a partial reference in the development of fish tracking algorithms.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), significant progress has been made in developing open-vocabulary robotic manipulation systems. However, many existing approaches overlook the importance of object dynamics, limiting their applicability to more complex, dynamic tasks. In this work, we introduce KUDA, an open-vocabulary manipulation system that integrates dynamics learning and visual prompting through keypoints, leveraging both VLMs and learning-based neural dynamics models. Our key insight is that a keypoint-based target specification is simultaneously interpretable by VLMs and can be efficiently translated into cost functions for model-based planning. Given language instructions and visual observations, KUDA first assigns keypoints to the RGB image and queries the VLM to generate target specifications. These abstract keypoint-based representations are then converted into cost functions, which are optimized using a learned dynamics model to produce robotic trajectories. We evaluate KUDA on a range of manipulation tasks, including free-form language instructions across diverse object categories, multi-object interactions, and deformable or granular objects, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. The project page is available at http://kuda-dynamics.github.io.

Within recent approaches to text-to-video (T2V) generation, achieving controllability in the synthesized video is often a challenge. Typically, this issue is addressed by providing low-level per-frame guidance in the form of edge maps, depth maps, or an existing video to be altered. However, the process of obtaining such guidance can be labor-intensive. This paper focuses on enhancing controllability in video synthesis by employing straightforward bounding boxes to guide the subject in various ways, all without the need for neural network training, finetuning, optimization at inference time, or the use of pre-existing videos. Our algorithm, TrailBlazer, is constructed upon a pre-trained (T2V) model, and easy to implement. The subject is directed by a bounding box through the proposed spatial and temporal attention map editing. Moreover, we introduce the concept of keyframing, allowing the subject trajectory and overall appearance to be guided by both a moving bounding box and corresponding prompts, without the need to provide a detailed mask. The method is efficient, with negligible additional computation relative to the underlying pre-trained model. Despite the simplicity of the bounding box guidance, the resulting motion is surprisingly natural, with emergent effects including perspective and movement toward the virtual camera as the box size increases.

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 .

Linear objects convey substantial information about document structure, but are challenging to detect accurately because of degradation (curved, erased) or decoration (doubled, dashed). Many approaches can recover some vector representation, but only one closed-source technique introduced in 1994, based on Kalman filters (a particular case of Multiple Object Tracking algorithm), can perform a pixel-accurate instance segmentation of linear objects and enable to selectively remove them from the original image. We aim at re-popularizing this approach and propose: 1. a framework for accurate instance segmentation of linear objects in document images using Multiple Object Tracking (MOT); 2. document image datasets and metrics which enable both vector- and pixel-based evaluation of linear object detection; 3. performance measures of MOT approaches against modern segment detectors; 4. performance measures of various tracking strategies, exhibiting alternatives to the original Kalman filters approach; and 5. an open-source implementation of a detector which can discriminate instances of curved, erased, dashed, intersecting and/or overlapping linear objects.

Analyses based on the body posture are crucial for top-class athletes in many sports disciplines. If at all, coaches label only the most important keypoints, since manual annotations are very costly. This paper proposes a method to detect arbitrary keypoints on the limbs and skis of professional ski jumpers that requires a few, only partly correct segmentation masks during training. Our model is based on the Vision Transformer architecture with a special design for the input tokens to query for the desired keypoints. Since we use segmentation masks only to generate ground truth labels for the freely selectable keypoints, partly correct segmentation masks are sufficient for our training procedure. Hence, there is no need for costly hand-annotated segmentation masks. We analyze different training techniques for freely selected and standard keypoints, including pseudo labels, and show in our experiments that only a few partly correct segmentation masks are sufficient for learning to detect arbitrary keypoints on limbs and skis.

A precise and user-friendly manipulation of image content while preserving image fidelity has always been crucial to the field of image editing. Thanks to the power of generative models, recent point-based image editing methods allow users to interactively change the image content with high generalizability by clicking several control points. But the above mentioned editing process is usually based on the assumption that features stay constant in the motion supervision step from initial to target points. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in the feature space of diffusion models, and find that features change acutely under in-plane rotation. Based on this, we propose a novel approach named RotationDrag, which significantly improves point-based image editing performance when users intend to in-plane rotate the image content. Our method tracks handle points more precisely by utilizing the feature map of the rotated images, thus ensuring precise optimization and high image fidelity. Furthermore, we build a in-plane rotation focused benchmark called RotateBench, the first benchmark to evaluate the performance of point-based image editing method under in-plane rotation scenario on both real images and generated images. A thorough user study demonstrates the superior capability in accomplishing in-plane rotation that users intend to achieve, comparing the DragDiffusion baseline and other existing diffusion-based methods. See the project page https://github.com/Tony-Lowe/RotationDrag for code and experiment results.

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

Sparse keypoint matching is crucial for 3D vision tasks, yet current keypoint detectors often produce spatially inaccurate matches. Existing refinement methods mitigate this issue through alignment of matched keypoint locations, but they are typically detector-specific, requiring retraining for each keypoint detector. We introduce XRefine, a novel, detector-agnostic approach for sub-pixel keypoint refinement that operates solely on image patches centered at matched keypoints. Our cross-attention-based architecture learns to predict refined keypoint coordinates without relying on internal detector representations, enabling generalization across detectors. Furthermore, XRefine can be extended to handle multi-view feature tracks. Experiments on MegaDepth, KITTI, and ScanNet demonstrate that the approach consistently improves geometric estimation accuracy, achieving superior performance compared to existing refinement methods while maintaining runtime efficiency. Our code and trained models can be found at https://github.com/boschresearch/xrefine.