Visual Object Tracking

Fog severely degrades the visibility of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in skydominant, long-range imagery, reducing the reliability of downstream detection and tracking. This paper presents a task-driven evaluation framework that links depth-aware synthetic fog generation, image restoration, object detection, and tracking within a unified pipeline. Given the practical difficulty of collecting and annotating foggy UAV scenes, synthetic fog is generated from real clear-weather outdoor images containing UAV targets using monocular depth estimation and the atmospheric scattering model. Representative restoration methods from classical, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, and transformer-based families are first compared, after which the selected restoration model is integrated into the downstream perception pipeline. Detection is evaluated under both clean-only and fog-inclusive training regimes using multiple detector variants, while tracking-by-detection is assessed on clean, foggy, and restored video sequences. Beyond image-level restoration metrics, the study evaluates how fog and restoration affect detection robustness and tracking performance. The results show that fog substantially degrades both detection and tracking, primarily through increased missed detections. Fog-inclusive training provides the most consistent improvement in robustness, whereas test-time restoration is most beneficial when the detector has been trained only on clean imagery. These findings show that restoration quality does not necessarily translate into proportional gains in downstream perception and therefore should be evaluated jointly with detection and tracking performance.

Autonomous drones are rapidly transforming modern warfare and civil applications alike. This paper presents the development of an integrated intelligent drone system designed to serve as a personal assistant. Leveraging the DJI Tello drone platform, we implemented a modular architecture that integrates three core artificial intelligence functionalities: facial detection, facial recognition, and depth estimation from monocular vision. A web-based interface enables seamless drone control and real-time video monitoring, while a Python-based server processes visual data and executes inference pipelines using lightweight neural models optimized for embedded systems. Unlike existing commercial solutions, this system emphasizes accessibility, low-cost hardware, and open-source technologies. The system demonstrates robust performance in real-world conditions, including person tracking, indoor scanning, and autonomous line following using virtual sensors. This project validates the applicability of advanced AI techniques in real-time robotic systems and illustrates the feasibility of deploying them on constrained hardware, providing a foundation for future research in autonomous UAVs for military, rescue, and surveillance missions.

At the heart of human visual perception lies the ability to maintain a continuous and coherent understanding of the external world. By integrating observations with accumulated experience, the human visual system can continuously adapt to variations in both the target and its surrounding environment, while preserving robust visual continuity as scene dynamics evolve. Human vision can therefore integrate prior knowledge, spatial geometry, and semantic context to understand complex scenes and their changes. As a core problem in computer vision, visual object tracking aims to bring machine perception closer to human visual perception. These capabilities are central to the task of Generic Object Tracking (GOT). In this task, a visual tracker is initialized only with the bounding box of an arbitrarily specified target in the first frame, and must continuously localize the target in subsequent dynamic visual streams. However, future events, observations, and real-world variations are inherently unpredictable; therefore, the model's generalization and online adaptation capabilities remain bottlenecks. Tracking reliability can deteriorate when the target undergoes severe deformation, is affected by complex distractors, encounters significant environmental changes, or belongs to a category unseen during training. This dissertation aims to narrow the gap between machine visual tracking systems and human visual perception by proposing a series of methods that systematically enhance the target discrimination, robust adaptation, and geometric reasoning capabilities of tracking models.

Domain adaptive visual object tracking under adverse weather conditions has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite the impressive performance, existing methods heavily rely on the large-scale video frames from both source and target domains, which is impractical under rigid resource constraints where source data is unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose SFDATrack, a generalized source-free domain adaptive tracker that merely leverages adverse weather samples from the target domain for robust state estimation. Specifically, SFDATrack first employs a mean-teacher backbone with Dual Interactive Mamba (DIM) blocks to distill the candidate target tokens that are resilient to weather variations from classified, augmented samples. Afterwards, we introduce a hyperspherical prototype projection (HPP) module to project these tokens onto multi-domain prototypes within a latent hyperspherical space. By enforcing both domain-specific and domain-invariant properties of the multi-domain prototypes, SFDATrack can be seamlessly adapted to diverse weather conditions with powerful generalizability. Extensive experiments evaluated on various benchmarks demonstrate that SFDATrack achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/watcherBR0/sfdatrack.

Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Moving Object Segmentation (MOS) are two fundamental tasks in computer vision that involve both spatial and temporal object dynamics. Existing methods rely predominantly on visual cues and thus often falter in real-world scenarios where object motions are inherently complex and nonlinear. To address this limitation, we propose SUMO, a zero-shot, training-free, unified framework integrating nonlinear dynamics with vision-based segmentation for accurate and consistent VOT and MOS. Specifically, we develop a nonlinear State Space Model (SSM) inspired by robotics principles to capture the complex object dynamics. Building on this model, we propose a Selective Unscented Filter (SUF) for accurate state estimation, which features a joint scoring mechanism and dynamically fuses multi-source predictions to identify the most plausible object state over time. Furthermore, we apply a memory selection mechanism to evaluate the reliability of memory frames. Our extensive experimental results show that SUMO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and MOS tasks.

Vision-based aerial tracking is critical in GPS-denied environments. Reliable perception for tracking depends on large-scale labeled data, yet most photorealistic datasets rely on heavy manual annotation and are time-consuming to produce. We present FalconTrack, a unified perception-and-tracking framework that (i) leverages a photorealistic editable simulator for automated label generation and (ii) combines multi-head perception with physics-aware tracking for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. FalconTrack provides an automated labeling pipeline in a Gaussian Splatting simulator that isolates target Gaussians from short object videos and composites them with randomized backgrounds to generate RGB, mask, class, and 6-DoF pose labels, producing about 10k labeled images in under 20 minutes. Using this dataset, we train a multi-head perception module with staged learning and reprojection consistency, and fuse its outputs with class-conditioned dynamics priors in an EKF for tracking. Our perception model outperforms two baselines and reaches 96-100% class accuracy in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on three geometrically diverse objects and two environments, while maintaining consistent performance in unseen simulated and real scenes. In real hardware closed-loop visual tracking, the onboard system runs at about 25 Hz and achieves 100% success in sim-to-real F1-tenth and gate tracking in five trajectories across two environments, while a mask-centered vision baseline drops to 60% success on F1-tenth during fast out-of-view scenarios.

Vision-language tracking guided by natural language specifications leverages high-level semantic cues of target objects to substantially boost tracking accuracy and robustness. Existing studies have verified that adaptively optimizing textual descriptions throughout the tracking process can effectively mitigate the semantic-visual mismatch induced by dynamic variations in target appearance, position, and other inherent attributes. Nevertheless, mainstream methods that directly generate textual information via sequence models or large language models inevitably suffer from inherent defects, including erroneous target updating, excessive background distraction, and pervasive hallucination artifacts. To address the aforementioned limitations, this paper proposes a novel language dependency parsing mechanism to precisely distill core tracking principal components, encompassing target objects, semantic concepts, and background contextual information. On this basis, we perform component-aware adaptive textual description updates by exploiting the powerful cross-modal understanding capability of the pre-trained vision-language model Qwen-VL. By integrating the proposed elaborately designed modules into the baseline framework, our method achieves consistent and superior tracking performance on multiple large-scale vision-language tracking benchmarks, including TNL2K, LaSOT, TNLLT, and OTB-LANG. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/Open_VLTrack.

Spatio-temporal grounding in long videos requires precise temporal localization and robust object tracking conditioned on natural-language queries. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) show strong reasoning ability, directly applying frame-by-frame inference to long sequences is computationally expensive and unstable. We propose a practical pipeline that shifts from frame-level to second-level tracking and performs cross-second smoothing to preserve continuity while reducing sequence length. To improve reasoning supervision, we synthesize chain-of-thought style trajectories using advanced multimodal models for temporal localization and target selection, and replace generated spatio-temporal coordinates with ground-truth annotations to avoid noisy supervision. We further optimize the policy with reinforcement learning using a verifier based on $t\_\mathrm{IoU}+mv\_\mathrm{IoU}$. Experiments across multiple FPS settings show that our method achieves a strong trade-off between efficiency and localization quality.

RGB-Event tracking improves localization robustness by fusing RGB appearance textures and dense temporal motion cues from event sensors. While this multi-modal scheme broadens tracking applicability, real-world scenes suffer diverse structured signal degradations that hinder traditional multi-modal fusion. In harsh environments, either modality can lose reliability drastically, and targets frequently appear incomplete due to occlusion, edge truncation and foreground clutter.To tackle the above challenges, we present a hierarchical perturbation and retrieval framework tailored for RGB-Event tracking with robustness against partial target missing and modal degradation, termed APRTrack. To mimic real-world signal corruption, APRTrack constructs structured degradation via two adversarial perturbation branches at the modality and spatial levels, which separately simulate full-modal failure and localized target region absence. A hierarchical routing mechanism is designed to disentangle the training pipelines of the two perturbation types, effectively eliminating feature collapse induced by superimposed degradation constraints. Furthermore, we devise Footprint-guided Channel-calibrated Hopfield Retrieval (FCHR) for reliable historical information compensation. This module evaluates retrieval confidence based on association footprints between queries and memory banks, and calibrates the retrieval metric space prior to Hopfield matching, realizing controllable historical feature compensation bounded to target regions. Extensive experiments on FE108, COESOT, VisEvent, and FELT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies for the RGB-Event visual object tracking. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) requires an agent to continuously follow a designated target while moving through dynamic environments. Existing embodied tracking methods generally rely on either an implicit target-selection convention or a language description, leaving the target-specification interface largely fixed. However, different tracking scenarios naturally favor different forms of target specification: language can specify a target outside the robot's current view, whereas spatial prompts provide direct instance designation for visible targets and can be useful for selecting among similar looking people, designating hard-to-describe individuals, or specifying a target under time pressure. We therefore introduce unified spatial-semantic prompting for EVT, in which text, a point, a box, and a mask serve as complementary target specifications that can be selected according to different scenarios, and present USS, an end-to-end architecture that maps any of them to egocentric waypoints. A modality-specific prompt encoder feeds a common design comprising hybrid-attention fusion, temporal memory, cross-view aggregation, latent prediction, and waypoint decoding, with one policy instance trained for each interface under an identical recipe. Across 320 zero-shot real-robot trials with policies trained only in simulation, spatial prompts perform comparably to language in ordinary tracking scenarios while providing clear benefits when visually similar targets require precise instance designation, supporting our premise that different scenarios favor different target specifications. On simulation EVT-Bench under the standard language-prompt protocol, USS obtains the highest success rate among non-MLLM methods at 57 FPS, against the 4.8-10 FPS reported by MLLM trackers that are stronger on several metrics. Project site: https://arescheah.github.io/uss-project-page/.

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4--0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining. Project page: https://hamadya.github.io/SENTRY/page/

The tracking-by-detection paradigm in multi-object tracking (MOT) typically relies on static appearance descriptors to complement motion estimation. However, these descriptors are frame-independent, limiting their robustness as visual cues. Since such descriptors are often obtained from computationally intensive pretrained backbones, real-time MOT systems frequently abandon appearance cues altogether and rely solely on motion prediction and geometric association. In this work, we introduce Polycepta, an object-centric appearance state estimation framework that reformulates appearance modeling as a recursive estimation problem rather than a frame-wise matching task. Polycepta constructs and continuously updates an independent appearance state for each tracked object, enabling future appearance representations to be estimated from accumulated observations. Polycepta is encouraged to learn the appearance-state construction of object-specific representations rather than memorize them through a proposed learning strategy, enabling appearance estimation for unseen classes. A key property of Polycepta is that the quality of appearance estimation improves as object states evolve during inference. While conventional appearance descriptors remain static or degrade over time, Polycepta progressively refines appearance estimates as additional observations are accumulated. Extensive experiments on KITTI, the Waymo Open Dataset, and MOT17 demonstrate consistent reductions in identity switches and improvements in tracking performance when integrated into the tracking-by-detection pipelines. Polycepta operates at 90.57 Hz and delivers state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark, achieving a MOTA of 92.27%.

4D dynamic scene understanding requires grounding language to a persistent worldline that binds identity, metric 3D motion, and synchronized multi-view 2D projections. Existing paradigms capture only part of this structure: large multimodal models reason over rich visual evidence but rarely preserve metric topology, while vision-language tracking remains tied to fragmented 2D or 3D outputs and local continuation. We therefore introduce \textbf{4DVLT}, a worldline-centered task for instruction-conditioned 4D dynamic scene understanding in fully observed multi-view video, and \textbf{Instruct-4D}, a benchmark with 129.4K question-answer pairs, 64.7K target entities, 851 scenes, and 9 reasoning-oriented query types. To address this setting, we present \textbf{4DTrack}, which casts instruction-conditioned tracking as graph-conditioned worldline inference through an object-centric 4D state graph, metric-guided routing, bidirectional decoding, and kinematic calibration. On Instruct-4D, 4DTrack-Qwen3.5-9B reaches 62.68 $\mathrm{TGA}_{\mathrm{Top1}}$ and surpasses the best adapted VLT baseline by 19.62 points. These results show that worldline-centered modeling improves both target grounding and recovered worldline quality. The project page is available at https://github.com/mikubaka88/4DVLT.

Hybrid neural networks (HNNs) that integrate artificial neural networks (ANNs) with brain-inspired neural networks have achieved broad success across perception and control tasks. However, much of the current success is confined to neuron-scale hybridization, where discrete, spike-based coding fundamentally limits applicability to continuous-state estimation tasks. In neuroscience, continuous attractor neural networks (CANNs) represent continuous states through neural ensembles, pointing to a population-scale route for HNNs to address this limitation. Yet, principled methodologies for ANN-CANN integration remain largely underexplored. In this work, we propose a theory-grounded ANN-CANN hybridization framework and instantiate it as a hybrid tracking neural network (HTNN) for visual object tracking, a representative continuous-state estimation task. The framework aligns ANN response maps with CANN dynamics in the same state space, enabling the two heterogeneous branches to interact through the shared state representation. Furthermore, we uncover a functional bias-variance complementarity: data-driven ANNs provide asymptotically unbiased estimates, while CANN estimates are low-variance but temporally lagged. By operationalizing this complementarity, HTNN achieves stable and accurate tracking across nine visual tracking benchmarks, consistently outperforming single-network baselines and existing hybrid models. Notably, these performance gains are robustly maintained even under diverse environmental variations, including occlusion, motion blur, and background interference. Through this proof-of-concept study, our framework offers a generalizable foundation for advancing HNNs toward population-scale hybridization.

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

In multi-object tracking, most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker while a small fraction is intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation significantly improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM 3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 87.2 HOTA.

Hyperspectral object tracking (HOT) leverages the rich spectral information provided by hyperspectral videos (HSVs), offering substantial potential for object tracking. However, efficiently extracting and exploiting spectral information from redundant spectral bands remains a fundamental challenge, which severely limits model generalization and tracking performance. Moreover, in dynamic scenes, targets often experience drastic appearance variations due to factors such as occlusion and illumination changes. These variations lead to large deformations between the current frame and the template. Such discrepancies pose major challenges for existing temporal modeling approaches. In this work, we propose VLHTrack, a novel hyperspectral vision-language (VL) joint tracking framework. Specifically, we incorporate language priors to address the fundamental challenge of spectral redundancy by designing a Language-Guided Band Selection Module (LBSM). By leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) descriptions, LBSM establishes a semantic-to-spectral mapping that mitigates redundancy and accentuates discriminative spectral features. A Multi-Modal Vision-Language Fusion Module is then employed to seamlessly integrate visual and linguistic embeddings, harnessing their complementary advantages to learn coherent cross-modal representations. To address target deformation in long-term sequences, we propose a dynamic update template feature strategy implemented via the Dynamic Template Update with Mamba (DTUM) module. By leveraging selective state space modeling, DTUM learns inter-frame dependencies to update template feature, ensuring efficient template feature evolution guided by temporal context. Experiments on HOT2023 and HOT2024 demonstrate that VLHTrack outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

In Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), classification, segmentation, and tracking objectives are jointly evaluated, but their individual contributions to performance loss remain opaque. We introduce a diagnostic framework that formulates identity and class assignment as an Integer Linear Program (ILP), yielding a model-agnostic oracle that hierarchically isolates each error source. Applied to seven VIS methods spanning online and offline paradigms across YouTube-VIS 2019/2021 and a diagnostic subset of OVIS, our analysis reveals a consistent picture. Tracking instability is a critical bottleneck for online methods, with gaps exceeding 20 AP under heavy occlusion, and grows sharply with video length and instance density. While semantic classification contributes meaningfully on standard benchmarks, its impact becomes negligible where tracking fails most. Although stronger backbones substantially lift default scores, they leave AP tracking gaps largely intact, confirming that temporal fragility is algorithmic rather than purely representational. To complement the oracle, we introduce TrackLens, a visual tool that translates gap magnitude into observable, query-level failure modes. Together, these tools provide a systematic foundation for targeting VIS's core challenge: robust long-term temporal association.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) from UAV imagery presents unique challenges: altitude varies across sequences, objects are small and densely packed, and frequent occlusion causes identity switches. Existing graph-based trackers assume fixed spatial context and treat all objects uniformly, ignoring the heterogeneous lifecycle states of detections, active tracklets, and lost targets. We propose HDST-GNN, a Heterogeneous Dynamic Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network with three novel contributions. First, Altitude-Adaptive Edge Construction estimates a camera-altitude proxy from mean object area and adjusts the graph connectivity radius accordingly. Second, Heterogeneous Node Representation models detections (Type-D), confirmed tracklets (Type-T), and lost tracklets (Type-L) as distinct node types with dedicated projections and typed edge relations. Third, Occlusion-Gated Temporal Aggregation gates each node's attention contribution by its occlusion confidence, preventing occluded nodes from corrupting neighbour embeddings. HDST-GNN is trained end-to-end with a differentiable Sinkhorn head using joint cross-entropy and triplet loss. On VisDrone2019-MOT with oracle detections, HDST-GNN achieves 94.51% MOTA and 97.24% IDF1, outperforming SORT by +5.0 MOTA points and reducing identity switches by 81%. With real YOLOv8n detections, HDST-GNN reduces identity switches by 49% vs. SORT. Ablation studies confirm the independent contribution of each component.

We present \emph{DisFlow}, a novel framework for online scene flow estimation from distance field that enables \emph{6DoF dynamic object pose estimation}, \emph{motion tracking}, and \emph{surface reconstruction}. The scene is represented by Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS), with surface normals serving as derivative constraints, enabling accurate signed distance computations near the surface and gradient queries with uncertainty. With this representation as a foundation, we compute a scene flow from the distance field that describes how surface points are transported over time in consecutive frames. Through our flow, we can estimate an object's pose and motion by incrementally registering a new observed point cloud via an elegant closed-form optimisation. Unlike prior methods that operate in the camera or world frame, our approach performs probabilistic fusion directly in the \emph{object frame}, where the object remains geometrically consistent over time. The tight coupling of the DisFlow method in space and time yields dense geometry, surface normals, object pose trajectories, velocities, and uncertainty, all at real-time rates. We evaluate DisFlow on dynamic object sequences and demonstrate that it achieves accurate pose and motion tracking while simultaneously reconstructing high-quality object surfaces. Code publicly available at https://github.com/LanWu076/disflow_ros2

Given the real-time demands of UAV tracking, many methods simplify the backbone to reduce computation, but this often weakens feature representation and degrades performance in complex scenarios. To alleviate this issue, we propose EATrack, an efficient and asymmetric UAV tracking framework centered around a teacher-guided dual-branch distillation strategy that enhances the feature expressiveness of the lightweight student model. Specifically, EATrack investigates two complementary perspectives of knowledge transfer: spatially focused feature-level distillation that compensates for weakened representations by guiding the student to learn strong target representations, and prediction-level distillation that enhances spatial localization by learning the teacher's capability for accurate target localization. Furthermore, to enhance robustness against appearance variations, we introduce a fine-grained target-aware distillation strategy that selectively transfers the teacher's target modeling capacity to the student. A temporal adaptation module is incorporated at inference to enhance robustness over time. Experiments on five UAV benchmarks demonstrate that EATrack achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and speed. Code: https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EATrack

Unsupervised visual object tracking is a challenging task that requires following arbitrary targets in videos without training on ground-truth annotations. Despite considerable progress, existing state-of-the-art unsupervised trackers often struggle in scenarios that demand fine-grained understanding of semantic and visual structural information within video frames. Text-to-image diffusion models are well known for their ability to generate images that accurately reflect the semantics and structures described in the input prompt, demonstrating a strong grasp of visual semantics and structures. Building on this capability, we approach the unsupervised tracking from a new perspective by exploiting the rich semantic knowledge encoded in pretrained text-to-image diffusion models. To adapt the diffusion models, which are originally developed for image generation, to the tracking task, we reinterpret the models as a bridge between text and image modalities. This connection is realized through the cross-attention mechanism: when both text and an image are input into the models, they highlight the regions of the image that are semantically aligned with the text in the cross-attention maps. We therefore learn a prompt that represents the tracking target and activates its corresponding region in the cross-attention map for each frame, which enables object tracking with the diffusion model. Specifically, our method Diff-Tracking is composed of two main components: an initial prompt learner and an online prompt updater. The initial prompt learner generates a prompt that captures the target object in the first frame, allowing the diffusion model to identify the target. The online prompt updater refines the prompt based on motion information, enabling consistent tracking across video frames. We evaluate our approach on six challenging tracking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Track materialization converts raw video into reusable object tracks that downstream queries can run against without rerunning tracking, but extracting those tracks efficiently and with high fidelity remains expensive. Prior systems reduce cost through temporal frame sampling, erasing the inter-frame motion that fine-grained tracking requires. In stationary video, however, large portions of each frame contain no objects of interest, and the remaining regions tolerate different sampling rates. We present Tetris, a track-extraction system that decomposes videos into a tile-based polyomino data model, enabling fine-grained spatiotemporal pruning that reduces detector calls with minimal fidelity loss. Tetris runs three operators upstream of the user-provided detector: a classifier identifies relevant tiles and groups them into polyominoes, an integer linear program (ILP) prunes redundant polyominoes under a user-specified accuracy constraint, and a packer assembles the survivors into canvases that minimize detector calls. Across 7 stationary-video datasets, Tetris stays within a 5% tracking accuracy loss of a full-frame, every-frame reference pipeline, whereas prior systems exceed this bound on 3 of the 7 datasets. At this 5% bound, Tetris achieves up to 17.4x higher throughput than prior systems and up to 68.8x higher than the reference pipeline. The project page is at https://tetris-db.github.io .

Reconstructing the motion of objects from videos is a key component for embodied AI and robot manipulation. While diverse approaches to object pose tracking have been studied, they rely heavily on strong external priors, such as depth data or 3D templates, and remain highly vulnerable to severe occlusions by hand grasps despite the use of explicit masks. In this work, we present ComPose, a 6DoF object tracking framework designed for hand-aware object pose estimation from RGB video. Rather than treating the hand purely as an occluder, our method harmonizes hand motions as a \textit{complementary cue} for object tracking. In detail, we recover a variety of object motions over time by combining object and hand cues from foundation models within a unified tracking pipeline. Here, ComPose adaptively selects informative hand joints, combines object- and hand-derived cues for motion estimation, and refines the resulting object motion using visible geometric evidence and a learned correction. We further enforce the temporal consistency over both rotation and translation, yielding stable 3D object trajectories over time without any external smoothing. Extensive experiments show that our method is accurate, efficient, and robust under severe hand occlusion and geometric ambiguity. In addition, the resulting trajectories can also effectively transfer to downstream robot manipulation by enabling robots to reconstruct human actions from online videos.

Traditional visual object tracking (VOT) methods typically rely on task-specific supervised training, limiting their generalization to unseen objects and challenging scenarios with distractors, occlusion, and nonlinear motion. Recent vision foundation models, exemplified by SAM 2, learn strong video understanding priors from large-scale pretraining and offer a promising foundation for building more robust and generalizable trackers. However, directly applying SAM 2 to VOT remains suboptimal, as it does not explicitly model target motion dynamics or enforce geometric and semantic consistency across frames, both of which are essential for reliable tracking. To address this issue, we propose SAMOSA, a new tracking framework that adapts SAM 2 to complex VOT scenarios by explicitly leveraging motion, geometry, and semantic cues. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight nonlinear motion predictor to model target dynamics and guide mask selection as well as memory filtering. We further exploit semantic cues to detect target shifts and recover from tracking failures, while geometric cues are incorporated as structural constraints to improve tracking stability. In this way, SAMOSA bridges the gap between the implicit video understanding prior of SAM 2 and explicit tracking-oriented modeling. Extensive experiments show that SAMOSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SAM 2--based approaches on general benchmarks, demonstrates stronger generalization than supervised VOT methods, and achieves substantial gains on anti-UAV datasets, which typify complex nonlinear motion scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/DurYi/SAMOSA.

Recent aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) datasets have grown rapidly, but they primarily address goal-oriented navigation to static destinations, leaving UAV visual tracking -- continuously following a moving target while maintaining visibility -- largely without dedicated training data. We introduce CosFlyTrack, a large-scale multi-modal dataset and scalable generation pipeline for UAV visual tracking in urban environments. The dataset provides approximately 12,000 expert and perturbed UAV trajectories generated from 6,000 pedestrian paths, comprising 2.4 million timesteps (approximately 334 hours) with seven aligned data channels: RGB, metric depth, semantic segmentation, six-degree-of-freedom drone pose, target state with visibility flag, bilingual (Chinese-English) instructions, and trajectory-pair metadata. To generate high-quality expert trajectories, we develop MuCO, a multi-constraint optimizer that plans directly in continuous three-dimensional space with BVH-accelerated collision and visibility queries, jointly enforcing target visibility, viewpoint quality, collision avoidance, smoothness, and kinematic feasibility, avoiding the discretization artifacts and post-hoc smoothing of grid-based planners. Fine-tuning experiments on seven vision-language models show that CosFlyTrack improves tracking performance to 78.3 to 95.6 percent SR@1 meter, a 53 to 69 percentage point gain over zero-shot baselines, supporting the dataset as a training resource for dynamic target-following agents. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AutelRobotics/CosFly; evaluation scripts and pre-trained checkpoints are hosted at https://huggingface.co/AutelRobotics/CosFly-Track.

Modern visual object trackers show impressive results on general targets, yet their performance drops substantially when dealing with scene text. Although currently underexplored, tracking text in videos is essential for dynamic text manipulations such as segmentation, removal, and editing. To fill this gap, this paper formalizes this specific task as Scene Text Tracking and presents the first systematic work for it. We identify three primary challenges in this task: 1) severe geometric distortions from perspective shifts, 2) high visual ambiguity across different instances, and 3) high sensitivity to fine-grained structural details. To address these issues, we propose SymTrack, a unified detection-free framework with synergistic dual-branch design. It integrates a Cross-Expert Calibration mechanism to reduce semantic bias, along with a Predictive Token Rectification mechanism to correct structural imbalances, complemented by an Adaptive Inference Engine that stabilizes predictions under motion constraints. Considering the lack of dedicated benchmarks for this task, we utilize three datasets from video text spotting to construct a benchmark with high-quality annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SymTrack sets the new state-of-the-art on all three benchmarks, outperforming previous best trackers by up to 11.97% AUC on $\text{BOVText}_{\text{SOT}}$. Overall, our work promotes efficient and thorough text tracking, paving the way toward more generalized video text manipulation.

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.

Refining visual representations by eliminating their internal feature-level redundancy is crucial for simultaneously optimizing the performance and computational cost of models in visual tracking. To enhance their performance, many contemporary Transformer-based trackers leverage a larger number of historical template frames to capture richer spatio-temporal cues. However, this strategy leads to a massive number of input visual tokens. This creates two critical issues: it imposes a quadratic computational burden and can also degrade the tracker's overall performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a compress-then-interact tracking framework, ETCTrack, that learns to efficiently compress template tokens from historical template frames into a robust target representation, moving beyond handcrafted rules. Our method first employs the Adaptive Token Compressor to dynamically construct compact yet highly discriminative template tokens by filtering out redundant visual tokens. These refined template tokens are then processed by our Hierarchical Interaction Encoder to achieve a deep, adaptive interaction with the search features. Refined search features ensure subsequent precise target localization. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. ETCTrack-B224 reduces the number of template tokens by 60%, leading to a 21.4% reduction in MACs with only a 0.4% drop in accuracy. The source code are available at https://github.com/PJD-WJ/ETCTrack.

Conventional visual object trackers localize targets using handcrafted spatial priors, often in the form of heatmaps. Such priors provide only surrogate supervision and are poorly aligned with tracking optimization and evaluation metrics, such as intersection over union (IoU) and area under the success curve (AUC). Here, we introduce RELO, a REinforcement-learning-to-LOcalize method for visual object tracking that formulates target localization as a Markov decision process. Specifically, RELO replaces handcrafted spatial priors with a localization policy learned over spatial positions via reinforcement learning, with rewards combining frame-level IoU and sequence-level AUC. We additionally introduce layer-aligned temporal token propagation to improve semantic consistency across frames, with negligible computational overhead. Across multiple benchmarks, RELO achieves superior results, attaining 57.5% AUC on LaSOText without template updates. This confirms that reward-driven localization provides an effective alternative to prior-driven localization for visual object tracking.