Point Tracking
Momentum
5 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.
Latest papers 23
Tracking any point of a dynamic scene in metric 3D - in absolute meters, not up to an unknown scale - underpins 3D and 4D reconstruction, robot navigation, and autonomous driving, where decisions are made in meters, not pixels. Our objective is a 3D point tracker accurate in those absolute terms and operating within a single commodity GPU, pose-free, monocular budget. Our method rests on one observation: once a point's 2D image trajectory is fixed, the quantity that governs its metric accuracy is the depth along its pixel ray. Rather than learning tracking end-to-end, we therefore compose two frozen front-ends - dense optical flow for 2D correspondence and a monocular metric-depth network for the third dimension - and learn only the residual they cannot supply: that depth, refined by a compact state space model (Mamba-3) conditioned on appearance features (DINOv3). A state space model rather than the transformers the strongest 3D trackers adopt is what makes a single-GPU budget attainable: it summarises a track in a fixed-size recurrent state whose memory cost is constant in the number of frames, whereas attention requires a key-value cache that grows linearly with them. On the TAPVid-3D minival benchmark our best configuration attains the highest absolute metric accuracy among methods evaluated under identical conditions (mean metric Average Jaccard, 0.256), exceeding strong feed-forward trackers, while a companion analysis, reproduced with each competitor's own evaluator, explains why several published trackers lose most of their accuracy under this budget.
TrackEverything: Long Horizon Dense Tracking via De-Duplicating 3D Scene Representations
Existing point tracking models face a fundamental tradeoff: they can either track a sparse set of query points over long horizons, or track all points across only short clips. We introduce TrackEverything, a 3D point tracker that breaks this trade-off by representing videos as persistent 3D scene tracks in world coordinates. Grounded in the insight that videos are 2D projections of an underlying 3D world, TrackEverything decouples model complexity from video duration, allowing it to scale with unique physical scene geometry instead. Our approach introduces three key innovations. First, we employ a voxelization-based de-duplication mechanism at sliding-window boundaries to merge co-located tracks, preventing repeated observations of the same surface from redundantly accumulating. Second, we decompose tracking into an endpoint refiner that predicts each point's destination and static-versus-dynamic classification, followed by a lightweight trajectory refiner that decodes dense trajectories exclusively for dynamic points. Third, we propose 3D WAFT, replacing memory-prohibitive 4D correlation volumes with efficient feature sampling in the scene cloud. To the best of our knowledge, TrackEverything is the first 3D tracker capable of tracking all visible points across videos exceeding 1000 frames within 40 GB of GPU memory. On TAPVid-3D, TrackEverything outperforms all open-source all-frame dense 3D trackers by more than 20% APD on short clips, while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art sparse trackers on long sequences, despite tracking far more points.
SAVTrack: Selective Vote Aggregation for Reliability-Aware Point Cloud Tracking
3D single object tracking (SOT) in LiDAR point clouds is essential for autonomous systems, but remains challenging under sparse and incomplete observations. In such cases, different target points provide highly uneven constraints on the object center, causing some point-to-center votes to be substantially less reliable than others. Existing point-based trackers typically aggregate these hypotheses without explicitly modeling their reliability, allowing inaccurate votes to contaminate proposal clustering and degrade localization accuracy. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{SAVTrack}, a motion-aware tracking framework with \textbf{Selective Vote Aggregation (SAV)}. SAVTrack estimates the reliability of each candidate vote from both local seed features and inter-frame motion context, and removes low-confidence hypotheses before proposal clustering. This pre-aggregation gating prevents unreliable hypotheses from affecting cluster formation while introducing only modest computational overhead. SAVTrack achieves competitive performance on KITTI and nuScenes, reaching 68.4/87.4 and 58.44/69.82 Success/Precision, respectively, while running at 82 FPS. It retains fewer than one-sixth of the candidate votes used by dense aggregation and remains particularly effective under sparse target observations.
Predictive Multi-Landmark OCT Tracking for Increased Motion Robustness
Optical coherence tomography is a promising modality for markerless motion tracking due to its high spatial resolution and inherent depth perception. However, existing OCT-based tracking approaches are limited in terms of trackable velocity, particularly when multiple landmarks are tracked sequentially for 6D pose estimation. In this work, we present a predictive tracking approach that propagates positional updates between multiple tracked landmarks to obtain a global pose prediction. This enables more robust tracking under high velocities. Our results demonstrate RMSEs below 1 mm for velocities up to 100 mm/s and up to nine consecutively tracked landmarks, highlighting the potential of global motion propagation and prediction for improving the robustness of OCT-based tracking.
Point4D: Long-range 4D Motion Reconstruction
We introduce Point4D, a feed-forward model for 4D reconstruction of long-range video sequences. Point4D is able to reliably infer dense per-point 3D trajectories across multi-hundred-frame videos, unlike existing 4D methods that are limited to short input windows of at most a few dozen frames. A key innovation that enables this is our flexible 3D query-based motion decoder that decouples trajectory prediction from image-plane visibility. The predicted 3D endpoints are then directly re-queried in the next chunk without re-projection or matching. Furthermore, we show that extracting and reusing a visual descriptor from an arbitrary frame where the point is visible leads to better performance than relying solely on the source patch. Overall, Point4D achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-video tracking benchmarks spanning over 200 frames and largely outperforms previous feed-forward 4D method. Project page: https://point-4d.github.io
TAPVid-MV: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in 3D Across Multiple Views
Multi-camera systems are increasingly practical for robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous driving because complementary views reduce depth ambiguity and preserve visibility under occlusion. Existing point-tracking benchmarks, however, focus on a single video or static multi-camera rigs. None test long-term 3D point tracking across several synchronized views under camera motion. We introduce TAPVid-MV (Tracking Any Point in Video across Multiple Views), the first benchmark for this setting. It contains a curated set of 284 sequences, 1,142 calibrated camera streams, and 109,769 point tracks across seven subsets spanning indoor and outdoor domains, from robotics and human activity to driving and synthetic procedural scenes. We obtain these trajectories using dataset-specific auxiliary modalities: sensor depth, LiDAR, SLAM and SfM points, human meshes, posed object meshes, and simulation. Every sequence and trajectory is visually verified by human annotators. Across more than 30 baselines, no method comes close to solving the task. Surprisingly, existing multi-view point trackers do not consistently outperform monocular point trackers. By evaluating reconstruction and point tracking on the same datasets, TAPVid-MV helps distinguish errors in recovered geometry from errors in point correspondence. Through this joint analysis, we identify geometry recovery as a major bottleneck for accurate 3D point tracking. Beyond multi-view 3D point tracking, our released annotations support monocular 2D and 3D point tracking, future-trajectory prediction, and 4D reconstruction.
Marrying Optimal Transport and ODEs for Unified Continuous-Time 4D Reconstruction and Tracking
Existing unified 4D reconstruction and point tracking approaches typically rely on heuristic interpolations or just predict at integer timestamps, lacking kinematic coherence and failing to model dynamics at any arbitrary timestamp. In this paper, we propose Uni4R, a framework that unifies these tasks by learning continuous velocity fields through the synergy of Optimal Transport (OT) and Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). Importantly, this continuous velocity field acts as a kinematic prior that mutually benefits both 4D reconstruction and point tracking. Specifically, we propose the Flow Matching Guided Decoder (FMGD). A global velocity branch first extracts anchor features that capture the global dynamic state of the sequence. Then, FMGD leverages Flow Matching (FM) theory to formulate a probability path defined by OT on the anchor feature manifold, instantiating it as FM-guided velocity features for velocity prediction. This establishes a robust kinematic inductive bias. Meanwhile, a point reconstruction branch provides geometric features. The local velocity prediction module then joint above features and time embeddings, to decode velocities at arbitrary timestamps. To overcome the absence of high-quality ground-truth velocities in fractional frames, we propose an integral-consistency training strategy. This strategy uses an ODE solver to integrate velocities to recover target pointmaps, enabling the model to be supervised end-to-end directly from integer timestamps. Experimental results demonstrate that Uni4R achieves SOTA performance in both 4D reconstruction and point tracking, and achieves SOTA in our new kinematics-aware benchmark at continuous time.
GoStop: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Temporal Aggregation in Event-Based Feature Tracking
Feature tracking plays a fundamental role in understanding scene motion and supports various downstream tasks. Event cameras, with their high temporal resolution and asynchronous sensing, enable low-latency and motion-robust perception, making them well-suited for feature tracking under fast and non-linear motion. However, existing event-based feature tracking methods rely on fixed heuristic rules based on hand-tuning for event accumulation. Such strategies fail to adapt to diverse motion dynamics, leading to degraded performance under abrupt motion changes or low-motion scenarios. In this paper, we model event accumulation as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce reinforcement learning (RL) framework to adaptively control the accumulation process for online event-based feature tracking. Our approach trains a RL agent that decides whether to continue accumulating events or to perform tracking inference based on motion cues. The proposed adaptive temporal agent enables dynamic adaptation to varying motion patterns without relying on hand-crafted rules. Furthermore, we introduce a Dynamic Event-based Tracking (DEFT) dataset with dynamic motion distributions to evaluate the robustness of the feature tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating our plug-and-play framework to existing feature tracking methods consistently outperforms heuristic-based approaches, improving robustness under dynamic motion while offering a better balance between tracking accuracy and efficiency. Our project codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/kmax2001/GoSTOP
Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2025 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared Challenge (STIRC2025)
Point tracking in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. This paper introduces the 2025 iteration of a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants submit their algorithms for quantification. Their algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge named the STIR Challenge 2025 (STIRC2025). The STIR Challenge 2025 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests algorithm inference latency. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2025, and seven teams participated in this challenge. In this paper we summarize the challenge results and participant methods. The challenge dataset is available at: https://zenodo.org/records/20191078, and the code for baseline models and metrics calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics
A Unified Model for Highly Accurate ECG-Free Dynamic Coronary Roadmapping Using Spatio-Temporal Transformers
Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) is a minimally invasive procedure used to restore coronary blood flow obstructed by atherosclerotic plaque. During PCI, repeated injections of iodine-based contrast agents are required to visualize the coronary arteries and guide interventional devices. However, frequent contrast injections increase radiation exposure and the risk of contrast-induced nephropathy, with acute kidney injury reported in up to 30% of patients with renal impairment. Dynamic Coronary Roadmapping (DRM) reduces these risks by overlaying a precomputed angiographic vessel map onto live fluoroscopy and continuously updating it throughout the procedure. Accurate DRM relies on precise cardiac phase matching between angiography and fluoroscopy, together with reliable catheter tip tracking for motion compensation. These tasks remain challenging in ECG-free settings and when only limited manual annotations are available. We present a unified DRM framework that simultaneously performs cardiac phase matching and catheter tip tracking for accurate real-time guidance. Our method employs a large-scale spatio-temporal encoder pretrained on 16 million X-ray frames to learn cardiac motion dynamics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of large-scale spatio-temporal pretraining for motion compensation in DRM. We further introduce auxiliary tasks based on ECG R-peak detection and catheter tip tracking, improving optimization while eliminating the need for extensive catheter mask annotations. Finally, a majority-voting postprocessing strategy aggregates temporal predictions, improving robustness and providing a confidence score that correlates with phase-matching error. Comprehensive evaluation on clinical X-ray datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving low temporal misalignment and robust phase-matching accuracy suitable for real-time DRM.
E-TraMamba: A New Paradigm for Efficient Long-Term 3D Feature Tracking with Event Cameras
Event-based 3D tracking enables low-latency and high-speed perception, while existing CNN- and Transformer-based trackers struggle to capture long-range spatiotemporal dependencies in sparse, noisy event streams, especially under real-time and efficiency constraints. To address these challenges, we present E-TraMamba, the first Mamba-based framework for 3D feature tracking on event data. This new framework adopts a linear state-space model for efficient long-range modeling and integrates a lightweight affine-transform predictor to maintain stable tracking under motion blur and occlusion. We also design an effective scheme to fuse multi-scale cues -- local spatiotemporal patches, correlation maps, and positional embeddings -- into a unified representation that enables stable and smooth 3D tracking. We construct a large-scale synthetic dataset, named EvD-PointOdyssey, which is generated with monocular rendering and provides synchronized event streams, depth maps, and accurate 3D trajectories for training and evaluating event-based 3D tracking models. Extensive experiments on event-based benchmarks demonstrate that E-TraMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering over longer feature lifetimes under strict accuracy thresholds (e.g., 0.1 m), with higher tracked-feature ratios and lower RMSE than all baselines. These results make E-TraMamba a strong candidate for low-latency visual odometry, real-time SLAM, and interactive robotics.
Generative AI for Safe and Photorealistic Drone Light Shows
Drone light shows are redefining aerial entertainment, yet their widespread adoption is bottlenecked by labor-intensive, manual animation. While generative AI promises an automated alternative, current frameworks fail to provide photorealism with fluid, dynamic motion. To address this limitation, we introduce SWAN, an end-to-end pipeline that synthesizes photorealistic, large-scale, and collision-free drone choreographies directly from text prompts. SWAN converts text into realistic reference videos and translates these pixel-space dynamics into physical swarm kinematics using a novel, adaptive point-tracking algorithm. Unlike existing trackers, this method maintains spatial coherence through severe occlusions and rapid topological shifts. A dedicated planner then allocates these trajectories to individual drones, while a subsequent safety filter ensures collision-free execution. We demonstrate scalability by safely orchestrating simulated 2,000-drone formations and validate physical feasibility on a dense real-world swarm of 49 quadcopters, operating everything entirely on standard consumer hardware. Combined, this work demonstrates how generative AI can be leveraged to automate multi-robot choreography design, providing an accessible new framework for drone light shows.
ISOPoT: Imaging Sonar Odometry by Point Tracking
Reliable navigation in underwater environments remains a key challenge in marine robotics. In such scenarios, forward-looking sonars are a natural choice for long-range perception, offering wide coverage even in turbid, low-visibility conditions. However, sonar images are inherently noisy, contain artifacts, and lack rich semantic structure, causing standard computer vision methods for keypoint detection and matching to perform poorly. In this paper, we introduce ISOPoT, an imaging sonar odometry method based on modern point tracking techniques. We propose a sonar odometry pipeline that uses multi-frame point tracks as its primary correspondence representation, augmented with lightweight optimizations to improve robustness. We evaluated the proposed method on the Aracati 2017 dataset, as well as on an internal sonar dataset collected in real-world underwater environments. Our results show that ISOPoT outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods consistently in both sonar-only scenarios and in multi-sensor settings.
Go-with-the-Track: Video Compositing and Motion Control with Point Tracking
Filmmaking demands precise motion control and reference image compositing -- capabilities that existing methods treat separately. Point-track-conditioned image-to-video models restrict content insertion to the first frame, while reference-to-video models lack fine-grained spatial-temporal control over how reference content integrates across frames. We present Go-with-the-Track, which unifies both capabilities by jointly conditioning on multiple reference images and reference-anchored point-tracks -- extending conventional point-tracks to explicitly establish correspondences between generated frames and reference images, thus enabling precise compositing and motion control throughout the video. To achieve this, we introduce spatially-aware point-track embeddings that encode the full sequence of point-track coordinates using a coordinate-wise MLP followed by temporal pooling. This representation captures the spatial characteristics of each point-track (serving as a unique identifier), while the embedding similarity correlates directly with spatial proximity, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish and associate point-tracks. We inject these point-track embeddings into a video diffusion transformer via a lightweight adapter, resolving the pixel-to-patch resolution mismatch while avoiding the substantial motion detail loss inherent in naive point-track subsampling. We use a hybrid training strategy to train jointly on dynamic, static, and synthetic scene video datasets to boost motion controllability. Experiments demonstrate that Go-with-the-Track achieves superior motion and reference control in a single model and enables new capabilities: multi-reference conditioned video generation with point-track driven compositing, as well as camera control for both static and dynamic scenes. Project Page: https://eyeline-labs.github.io/Go-with-the-Track/
Learning Global Motion with Compact Gaussians for Feed-Forward 4D Reconstruction
Dynamic scene reconstruction from monocular video remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing feed-forward methods predict 3D Gaussians pixel-wise for each frame, suffering from duplicated Gaussians and view-dependent biases that hinder effective learning of scene motion. We present C4G, a feed-forward 4D reconstruction framework built upon a compact set of timestamp-conditioned learnable Gaussian query tokens. Each token aggregates corresponding features across the full temporal context and decodes a 3D Gaussian whose position is modulated by the target timestamp, enabling globally coherent motion modeling without per-scene optimization. To capture fine-grained details, we further introduce a video diffusion model-based rendering enhancement module. Since our framework effectively aggregates features into Gaussians, we extend this capability to feature lifting, producing a 4D feature field that supports point tracking and dynamic scene understanding. C4G achieves strong novel-view synthesis performance using significantly fewer Gaussians and without requiring camera poses, while exhibiting stronger motion modeling and robustness to large temporal gaps.
Motion-guided sparse correction enables expert-quality point tracking across diverse microscopy regimes
Tracking the dynamics of non-canonical biological systems in microscopy videos remains a persistent challenge. Both classical and learning-based trackers depend on expert-reviewed data to be evaluated and adapted, yet exhaustive manual annotation rarely scales to the videos where these tools are needed most. We developed RIPPLE (Refinement Interpolation Platform for Point Location Estimation), which recasts annotation as sparse correction: a user clicks a starting point, RIPPLE proposes a full trajectory, and the user intervenes only where the trajectory drifts. We tested RIPPLE on five challenging microscopy datasets from our laboratories, four from the transparent jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica and one tracking landmarks on rapidly moving sperm. Across these, RIPPLE matched the quality of exhaustive manual annotation while reducing manual clicks by 3 to 25 times across datasets. RIPPLE thereby fills a missing layer between manual annotation and fully automated tracking, enabling immediate quantification of biological dynamics, method benchmarking, and the production of the gold-standard data needed to adapt future automated microscopy trackers.
Point Tracking Improves World Action Models
Robot policy learning benefits from world-action models that capture environment dynamics, but pixel-level prediction entangles dynamics with nuisance factors such as lighting and texture, making learned representations vulnerable to task-irrelevant visual variation. We propose JOPAT, a JOint Pixel-And-Track World-Action Model that predicts latent visual observations, 2D point tracks with visibility, and actions in a single denoising diffusion transformer. The key insight is that tracks provide an explicit representation of motion that captures long-horizon dynamics and remains robust under occlusion or partial out-of-frame motion, offering greater utility than modeling pixel appearance alone. On LIBERO and real-world LeRobot tasks, JOPAT improves over pixel-based baselines, with the largest gains on long-horizon tasks involving occlusion, object interaction, and off-screen motion.
Motion Cues from Image-based Point Tracking for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation
LiDAR scene flow estimation is essential for autonomous driving, as it provides 3D motion for each point. Self-supervised approaches use static-dynamic classification to mitigate the imbalance between static and dynamic points, deriving targeted supervision. However, existing methods rely on sparse geometric observations for this classification, making them vulnerable to data sparsity and occlusions. The resulting noisy labels provide incorrect motion guidance and degrade scene flow learning. To address this, we introduce TrackCue, a tracking-guided framework for improving dynamic object representation in LiDAR scene flow estimation. In particular, TrackCue repurposes point tracking to obtain dense image-space trajectories anchored to LiDAR points, providing motion cues beyond sparse geometric observations. Furthermore, we present a visually consistent motion compensation strategy that compares the tracked trajectories with ego-induced rigid trajectories in the image plane, effectively isolating true object motion from ego-induced apparent motion. To transfer these isolated motion cues back to the LiDAR domain, we perform visual motion cue lifting, which associates ego-compensated image trajectories with LiDAR points for static-dynamic label refinement. As a result, TrackCue produces more accurate static-dynamic classification and provides more reliable supervision for scene flow learning. Experimental results show that TrackCue significantly improves the precision and F1 score of dynamic labels, leading to performance gains in self-supervised scene flow estimation.
TrackCraft3R: Repurposing Video Diffusion Transformers for Dense 3D Tracking
Dense 3D tracking from monocular video is fundamental to dynamic scene understanding. While recent 3D foundation models provide reliable per-frame geometry, recovering object motion in this geometry remains challenging and benefits from strong motion priors learned from real-world videos. Existing 3D trackers either follow iterative paradigms trained from scratch on synthetic data or fine-tune 3D reconstruction models learned from static multi-view images, both lacking real-world motion priors. Pre-trained video diffusion transformers (video DiTs) offer rich spatio-temporal priors from internet-scale videos, making them a promising foundation for 3D tracking. However, their frame-anchored formulation, which generates each frame's content, is fundamentally mismatched with reference-anchored dense 3D tracking, which must follow the same physical points from a reference frame across time. We present TrackCraft3R, the first method to repurpose a video DiT as a feed-forward dense 3D tracker. Given a monocular video and its frame-anchored reconstruction pointmap, TrackCraft3R predicts a reference-anchored tracking pointmap that follows every pixel of the first frame across time in a single forward pass, along with its visibility. We achieve this through two designs: (i) a dual-latent representation that uses per-frame geometry latents and reference-anchored track latents as dense queries, and (ii) temporal RoPE alignment, which specifies the target timestamp of each track latent. Together, these designs convert the per-frame generative paradigm of video DiTs into a reference-anchored tracking formulation with LoRA fine-tuning. TrackCraft3R achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard sparse and dense 3D tracking benchmarks, while running 1.3x faster and using 4.6x less peak memory than the strongest prior method. We further demonstrate robustness to large motions and long videos.
EchoTracker2: Enhancing Myocardial Point Tracking by Modeling Local Motion
Myocardial point tracking (MPT) has recently emerged as a promising direction for motion estimation in echocardiography, driven by advances in general-purpose point tracking methods. However, myocardial motion fundamentally differs from motion encountered in natural videos, as it arises from physiologically constrained deformation that is spatially and temporally continuous throughout the cardiac cycle. Consequently, motion trajectories typically remain locally confined despite substantial tissue deformation. Motivated by these properties, we revisit the architectural design for MPT and find that coarse initialization in commonly used two-stage coarse-to-fine architectures may be unnecessary in this domain. In this work, we propose a fine-stage-only architecture, \textbf{EchoTracker2}, which enriches pixel-precise features with local spatiotemporal context and integrates them with long-range joint temporal reasoning for robust tracking. Experimental results across in-distribution, out-of-distribution (OOD), and public synthetic datasets show that our model improves position accuracy by and reduces median trajectory error by relative to a domain-specific state-of-the-art (SOTA) model. Compared to the best general-purpose point tracking method, the improvements are and , respectively. Moreover, EchoTracker2 shows better agreement with expert-derived global longitudinal strain (GLS) and enhances test-rest reproducibility. Source code will be available at: https://github.com/riponazad/ptecho.
Physics-Informed Tracking (PIT)
We propose Physics-Informed Tracking (PIT), a video-based framework for tracking a single particle from video, where a neural network autoencoder localizes a particle as a heatmap peak (landmark) and a differentiable physics module embedded in the autoencoder constrains several landmarks over time (a trajectory) to satisfy known dynamics. The novel Physics-Informed Landmark Loss (PILL) compares this predicted trajectory back against the landmarks, enforcing physical consistency without labels. Its supervised variant (PILLS) instead compares the prediction against ground-truth position, velocity, and bounce from simulation, enabling end-to-end backpropagation. To support supervised and unsupervised learning, we use an autoencoder with a split bottleneck that separates A) tracking-related structure via landmark heatmaps from B) background noise and subsequent image reconstruction. We evaluate a replicated 26 factorial design (n = 4 replicates, 64 configurations), showing that PILLS consistently achieves sub-pixel tracking accuracy for the bilinear and physics-refined decoder outputs under both clean and noisy conditions.
Probing and Leveraging Video Diffusion Transformer Features for Robust Point Tracking
Despite achieving strong results on standard benchmarks, current point tracking methods rely on feature backbones that are rarely designed with the temporal coherence needed for robust real-world performance. While recent works incorporate powerful visual foundation model (VFM) features into tracking pipelines, no prior work has systematically analyzed which VFM provides the most robust representations for point tracking. We present the first such analysis, evaluating diverse VFMs in a zero-shot setting on both standard and robustness benchmarks for point tracking. Our study reveals that video diffusion transformers (DiTs) consistently yield the most temporally coherent and discriminative features, even surpassing ResNet backbones explicitly supervised on tracking data. We hypothesize this advantage stem from large-scale video pretraining, full 3D spatio-temporal attention, and a diffusion training objective. Motivated by this finding, we propose DiTracker, which integrates video DiT features into existing tracking frameworks through query-key matching cost computation, cost-level fusion with a lightweight ResNet branch, and LoRA adaptation. Under the same tracking head, DiTracker is trained solely on synthetic data with far fewer iterations, yet outperforms CoTracker3 trained with additional real-world videos, with the largest gains under challenging and corrupted scenarios. It further generalizes across tracking heads and scales with backbone size, confirming that generative video pretraining provides real-world priors that reduce the dependence on large-scale real-data supervision.
Track and Caption Any Motion: Open-Vocabulary Spatiotemporal Captioning via Trajectory-Conditioned Generation
We present TCAM (Track and Caption Any Motion), a generative framework that watches a video and with no text query and no region prompt decides what is moving, describes each motion in open vocabulary, locates it in time, and points to the exact trajectories that carry it. Two mature lines of work make this possible yet leave it unsolved: dense point trackers follow pixels with sub-object precision but emit no language, while video-language models produce fluent descriptions only when handed a query and only from clip-level features that cannot resolve which pixels move. Object-level captioners narrow the gap but still reason over detector boxes or masks, never reaching individual trajectories. TCAM couples tracking and language at point granularity through a Caption-Aware Resampler, where a small set of learnable queries cross-attends to dense point trajectory tokens and distills them into a fixed-length motion context that conditions a language decoder. The decoder generates an entire video's events in a single pass, each with a free-form caption, a start and end time, and a pointer to the trajectories it refers to, for sequential events and several subjects active at once. Training uses only existing segmentation annotations, with no extra event labeling, to supervise caption quality, pointer-mask alignment, and pointer diversity. On over 50K clips, TCAM outperforms dense video captioning baselines and matches dedicated, query-based grounding and point-tracking methods despite using no query, showing that trajectory-conditioned generation is a direct route to motion-driven video understanding.