Overview

Visual object tracking estimates where a target moves over time, from a single object in a video to many objects across cameras, modalities, or 3D scenes. Common approaches match Siamese-network or Transformer features between frames, associate detections with track histories, and use motion models, geometric constraints, or memory to handle appearance changes, occlusion, and reappearance. Recent work also adapts video and segmentation foundation models, language guidance, event cameras, and learned memory control, with evaluations spanning benchmarks such as LaSOT, GOT-10k, MOT17, UAV tracking datasets, and specialized medical or 3D settings. A central challenge is making trackers reliable beyond standard benchmark conditions—especially over long absences, under severe occlusion or domain shifts—while keeping inference efficient and evaluation representative of real deployments.

Latest papers

CardsList

175 papers20 papers in the last four weeks, down 13% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. VisGeo-PipeTrack: A Visual Geometric Servo Control Framework with MPC-RCAPID Control for UAV-Based Dynamic Pipes Tracking

    Oct 26, 2026Zhenyang Gao, Jianlin Chen, Yang Yu +3Quadrotor ControlVision-Based Robot Control

  2. Semantic-Coupled Perception Framework for Autonomous Laparoscope Control

    Oct 25, 2026Enduo Zhao, Fangzhou Li, Yujie Zhu +4Surgical RoboticsRobotic Perception

  3. RoPT: Robust 6DoF Object Pose Tracking in Video

    Oct 20, 2026Yongqing Liang, Yuzhong Chen, Sihang Li +7Visual Object TrackingObject Pose Estimation

  4. VP-EVT: Active Visibility Preservation for Embodied Visual Tracking

    Oct 15, 2026Yanci Wen, Tianle Zeng, Jianwei Peng +3Active VisionVisual Object Tracking

  5. SAM3RL: Memory Control via Reinforcement Learning for Visual Object Tracking

    Oct 14, 2026Tomáš Čížek, Matej Straka, Illia Volkov +5Visual Object TrackingVideo Object Segmentation

  6. When Trackers Fail: VLM-Guided Verification and Recovery for Robust Video Object Segmentation

    Oct 11, 2026Valay Bundele, Susmit Agrawal, Mehran Hosseinzadeh +2Visual Object TrackingVideo Object Segmentation

  7. UniMergeTrack: Hierarchical Model Merging for General RGB-X Visual Object Tracking

    Oct 9, 2026Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Yuhe Ding +5Visual Object TrackingModel Merging

  8. Continuous Ground-Truth Construction and a Recovery Policy for Air--Water Robotic Tracking

    Oct 8, 2026Jiangong Xiao, Zhe Sun, Kanzhong Yao +5Visual Object Tracking

  9. LARK: A Low-Cost, Accurate, Occlusion-Resilient, Kalman Filter-Assisted Tracking System for Image-Guided Surgery

    Oct 6, 2026George Sideris, Justin Cree, Andrew Stirling +3Visual Object TrackingSurgical Instrument Tracking

  10. Difference Feature Map Distillation: Transferring Inter-Sample Relational Knowledge Towards Efficient Transformer-Based Tracking

    Oct 5, 2026Zhicheng Ding, Xinyu Chu, Qing TianVisual Object TrackingAutonomous Driving Perception

  11. VICON: Visual-Inertial-Contact based Hand-Object Tracking for Manipulation Datasets

    Oct 4, 2026Youbeen Jeon, Uiseong Shin, Hwanchul La +3Robot Manipulation Datasets3D Hand Pose Estimation

  12. Reflection-Robust 6DoF Object Tracking with Light Fields

    Oct 4, 2026Nikolai Goncharov, Donald G. DansereauVisual Object Tracking

  13. When Predicting Nothing Beats SAM 3: Revisiting Evaluation in Video Object Segmentation

    Oct 2, 2026Jihwan Hong, Woohyeon Park, Jaeik Kim +1Video Object SegmentationVisual Object Tracking

  14. iSEE: Object Permanence Through Self-Supervision

    Oct 1, 2026Pramish Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool +1Visual Object TrackingObject-Centric Representation Learning

  15. UniTrackPLA: Unified Panorama-Language-Action Model for Instruction-Guided Navigation and Dynamic Person Tracking

    Oct 1, 2026Pengfei Qi, Haoran Lin, Sizhuang Chen +7Visual Object TrackingRobot Navigation

  16. P-SRM: Selective Recovery of Rejected Predictions in Visual Tracking

    Sep 30, 2026Youbin He, Siwei WangVisual Object Tracking

  17. Template-Search Domain Adaptation via Multi-Stage Feature Alignment for Cross-Modal Object Tracking

    Sep 29, 2026Fereshteh Aghaee Meibodi, Amir Mehdi Soufi Enayati, Shadi Alijani +1Multimodal Visual Object TrackingDomain-Adversarial Learning

  18. End-to-End Self-Supervised RGB-T Tracking without Modality Misleading

    Sep 29, 2026Shenglan Li, Rui Yao, Kunyang Sun +4Multimodal RobustnessVisual Object Tracking

  19. Learning to Reason with Persistent Object States for Video Instance Segmentation

    Sep 28, 2026Yongxue Xu, Boxue Yang, Ziqian Liu +3Video Object SegmentationInstance Segmentation

  20. LoopTrack: A Simple Baseline for Parameter-Efficient Transformer Tracking

    Sep 27, 2026Liang Peng, Chenxiao Li, Libo Zhang +2Visual Object TrackingRecurrent Transformers

  21. PanoPed: Beyond Bounding Boxes for Sim-to-Real Panoramic Pedestrian Tracking

    Sep 25, 2026Qinfeng Zhu, Weiguang Zhao, Yunxi Jiang +2Visual Object TrackingMulti-Object Tracking

  22. TRACKGRAPH: Online Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs via Image-Space Tracking

    Sep 25, 2026Peder Borge Hellesylt, Albert Gassol Puigjaner, Kostas Alexis +1Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation3D Semantic Mapping

  23. TRACE: Interactive Bi-Directional Tracing of Monochrome Cables Amid Clutter

    Sep 24, 2026Nidhya Shivakumar, Ethan Ransing, Josh Zhang +6Active PerceptionVisual Object Tracking

  24. LiAM-SAM: Lifecycle-Aware Memory for Robust SAM2-Based MOT

    Sep 23, 2026Grégoire Francisco, Alessandro D'Amico, Samuele Costantini +2Visual Object TrackingMulti-Object Tracking

  25. SBMVTrack: Spike-Budgeted Multi-View Learning for Power-Efficient UAV Tracking

    Sep 21, 2026Pengzhi Zhong, Jiwei Mo, Haolun Li +4Activation SparsityVisual Object Tracking

  26. AgentSTAR: Agentic Shape Tracking and Reconstruction from Monocular Videos

    Sep 21, 2026Kirill Mazur, Nikita Karaev, Matthew Chang +2Articulated Object ReconstructionVisual Object Tracking

  27. Can Spiking Neural Networks play pinball? A neuromorphic motion detector for target tracking

    Sep 21, 2026Mazdak Fatahi, Šárka Pryjmaková, Pierre Boulet +1Event-Based VisionVisual Object Tracking