Cooperative 3D tracking must integrate complementary observations across agents and time while maintaining consistent identities. When evidence integration and identity inheritance share a matching decision, errors arising from cross-view appearance differences and spatial misalignment can compromise both feature fusion and track continuity. We propose FFBL-Coop, a fuse first, bind later framework that separates instance admission from identity management. Confidence-ranked Slot Admission (CSA) allocates cooperative queries to available ego slots using confidence and spatial proximity. Unified Representation Aggregation (URA) uses cooperative semantic features and aligned anchors to guide ego-feature retrieval, refining the augmented query bank within a shared transformer decoder. After refinement, Cooperative-Priority Identity Anchoring (CPIA) combines learned association with persistent mappings to establish accepted identity assignments across frames. A shared codebook reduces transmitted payload while retaining AP and AMOTA close to the uncompressed variant. FFBL-Coop achieves AMOTA/AP of 0.611/0.548 on V2X-Seq and 0.688/0.653 on Griffin-25M. Code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01750
Memory-attention-based Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have demonstrated strong zero-shot tracking capability, yet their substantial memory requirements confine them to short video clips and their single-prompt inference design makes multi-category open-vocabulary tracking computationally prohibitive. This work introduces two contributions toward fully automated tracking annotation of arbitrary video. The Generalized Presence Token (GPT) reformulates SAM3's inference pipeline to process N text prompts simultaneously via virtual prompt batching, reducing image encoding cost from O(N) to O(1) with no modifications to any learned component. The Annotation and Segmentation Handler (ASH) extends any memory-attention VIS tracker to sequences of arbitrary length through overlapping temporal chunks with IoU-based inter-chunk identity matching, requiring no dataset-specific training. Instantiated on SAM3, the resulting pipeline -- SAM3-ASH -- achieves state-of-the-art HOTA on MOTS20 under fully zero-shot conditions and remains competitive with trained specialists across seven additional benchmarks, while peak GPU memory consumption stays below 25 GB, establishing a practical baseline for scalable, training-free automated video annotation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01022
Many visual tracking methods use rejection mechanisms to suppress unreliable predictions. However, these mechanisms can also reject correctly localized candidates, leaving useful information unused. We investigate how to identify and recover these candidates while preserving native accepted outputs and candidate coordinates. To this end, we propose P-SRM (Post-rejection Selective Recovery Method), which combines spatial responses, past accepted states, and native decision margins to reassess candidates and selectively restore reliable predictions. We evaluate P-SRM on six trackers and four datasets spanning category-specific, point, and generic object tracking. Across all nine configurations, P-SRM improves rejected-candidate ranking and overall tracking performance. These results show that post-rejection verification can identify and recover useful predictions discarded by native rejection, demonstrating the value of reusing rejected information. Project repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39832
Visual object tracking typically assumes that the initial template and subsequent search frames share the same sensing modality. In practice, sensor availability or operation may change over time, creating a substantial representation gap between template and search frames. Unlike conventional multi-modal tracking where paired modalities are simultaneously available, cross-modal tracking requires localization when template and search frames originate from different active modalities. Accordingly, we introduce TSDA-Track, a Template-Search Domain Adaptation framework to reduce modality discrepancy during training. We investigate two feature alignment strategies. Pre-AFA TSDA-Track applies adversarial alignment before transformer's template-search interaction to suppress modality-specific bias. Enc-CFA TSDA-Track applies contrastive alignment to encoder representations after interaction to strengthen target-level cross-modal correspondence. Both variants retain a shared inference pipeline without modality-specific branches. Experiments on LasHeR, and zero-shot evaluations on RGBT234 and GTOT under multiple cross-modal protocols demonstrate improvements over representative state-of-the-art trackers. For instance, under the modality-switch protocol on RGBT234, Pre-AFA TSDA-Track achieves an SR/PR of 43.2/56.0, compared with 36.8/50.0 for ToMP-101 baseline. In addition, a study on Anti-UAV-024 further verifies the applicability of TSDA-Track to aerial tracking. Our study highlights the effectiveness of feature alignment domain adaptation for cross-modal tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38637
Quantifying collective fish behavior requires accurate trajectories, yet multi-view 3D tracking remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, visually similar individuals, and the long-standing scarcity of identity annotations. We present TrackFish3D, a geometry-driven self-supervised framework for dense multi-camera 3D tracking of schooling fish. Instead of relying on appearance-based re-identification or manually annotated identities, TrackFish3D turns calibrated multi-view geometry into supervision: triangulation and reprojection consistency provide pseudo-associations, while a geometric encoder and global association transformer learn all-to-all cross-view correspondence within each frame. To make these associations identity-aware, TrackFish3D introduces a self-supervised contrastive objective that separates co-visible individuals in the embedding space, together with a temporal predictor that preserves identities and bridges short occlusions across frames. The resulting model is trained once on unlabeled footage and applied directly to unseen test videos, requiring no cross-view identity labels, temporal annotations, 3D ground truth, appearance features, or test-time optimization. On our benchmark, TrackFish3D improves 3D Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy from 87.7% for the strongest baseline to 95.8%. On the 3D-ZeF zebrafish benchmark, it achieves 81.1% MOTA, compared with 77.4% for the best geometric baseline. TrackFish3D also generalizes beyond fish, achieving strong results on real-world bird tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38347
The ByteTrack algorithm is a widely used and computationally efficient multi-object tracking architecture. Its core innovation lies in the combination of lenient bounding box associations with tracklet similarity matching to robustly deal with object occlusions. However, this strategy is nevertheless vulnerable to erroneous track reclassification and identity switching, as detection confidence scores dictate association priority. To address this, I present a simple enhancement of the ByteTrack architecture, named ByteTraX, that optimises track continuity via a single unified matching threshold, while penalising identity switches through stringent track initiation criteria. This approach achieves consistently improved performance across a range of diverse benchmarks including GMOT-40, LC-MOT, SportsMOT, TeamTrack, DAMUNT, and DeepSea-MOT, while simultaneously increasing processing speed by >10%. Specifically, results demonstrate a >40% reduction in identity switches, accompanied by mean increases in HOTA of 3.6, IDF1 of 5.6, and FPS of 6.3. As such, adoption of the ByteTraX algorithm has the potential to substantially enhance tracking performance over the ByteTrack baseline, while retaining the efficiency needed for real-time deployment. To facilitate usage, I provide the source code, integration functionality for the YOLO family of object detection models, and deployment instructions via an open source repository.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37801
General multi-object tracking (GMOT) tracks all instances of a user-specified category from a single first-frame exemplar. Prior work relies on bounding boxes and surrogate training, and struggles with non-rigid objects, crowded scenes, and distractors. We introduce UGO, a unified GMOT tracker that pairs a pretrained exemplar-conditioned detection head with an instance-propagation head in a common architecture. A novel training-free, energy-minimization consolidation method converts overlapping proposals into exclusive pixel-wise masks and detections, resolving over-segmentation, duplicates, and conflicts. A hierarchical memory spanning global and instance levels improves recall and per-instance segmentation accuracy using a new memory management protocol. UGO sets a new state-of-the-art on GMOT benchmarks and video object counting, and is competitive with specialist MOT methods, establishing a strong paradigm for unified, open-category multi-object tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37339
RGB-T object tracking leverages the complementary characteristics of visible and thermal infrared modalities to improve robustness under adverse conditions. Existing supervised methods typically rely on costly modality-aligned bounding box annotations, while most self-supervised approaches follow a two-stage pseudo-labeling paradigm, making tracker training sensitive to pseudo-label quality and preventing joint end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose ESMTrack, a fully end-to-end self-supervised RGB-T tracking framework without offline pseudo-label generation or dense frame-level bounding box annotations. Given only the standard initial-frame annotation used in visual tracking, ESMTrack learns discriminative and temporally consistent representations through two complementary objectives: a grounding triplet loss on annotated initial frames and a cross-frame temporal triplet loss on unlabeled search frames, with reliable samples selected by forward-backward consistency. To address modality dominance bias, ESMTrack employs a three-branch architecture consisting of a fusion branch and two unimodal branches for RGB and thermal inputs. We quantify modality contributions using the Average Peak-to-Correlation Energy by measuring response discrepancies between the fusion and unimodal branches. The resulting reliability estimates guide a training-time modality decoupling mechanism that suppresses dominant-modality shortcuts and adaptively weights cross-modal contrastive learning for task-level alignment. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that ESMTrack achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance, strong cross-dataset generalization, and real-time inference speed. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37162
With the advent of snapshot cameras, hyperspectral video is becoming more readily available. In recent years, new applications have emerged which have led to increasingly larger datasets. However, hyperspectral video compression remains in the early stages. In this study, we explore the use of implicit neural representation as a candidate solution. We propose a novel extension of an existing RGB video compression model, achieving Bjøntegaard Delta PSNR gains of +4.99 dB and Bjøntegaard Delta rate of -88.88% compared to traditional hyperspectral image compression methods applied frame-by-frame. In addition to reconstruction quality, the effects on downstream task performance are measured in the form of object tracking success. Compared to video compressed with methods based on principal component analysis and JPEG2000 in low data regimes, our proposed method improves tracking area under the curve by up to 23.42% and distance precision by up to 35.56% on examples from the HOT2026 dataset.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31435
Segmentation-based multi-object tracking (MOT) with foundation video models such as SAM2 offers strong localization quality, yet remains fragile in crowded, real-world scenes. In detector-prompted SAM2 pipelines, failures typically arise at three stages of the object lifecycle: (i) erroneous or duplicate track initiation, (ii) memory drift during close interactions, and (iii) unreliable re-identification after long occlusions or re-entry. These errors corrupt object memory and accumulate over time, making long-horizon tracking unstable. In this paper, we reframe MOT as a lifecycle memory integrity problem. We present LiAM-SAM, a Lifecycle-Aware Memory (LiAM) framework with targeted mechanisms for each of the three failure modes. At track birth, to prevent faulty or duplicate initiations, we apply contrastive track initiation, which conditions each prompt on existing nearby tracked instances. To preserve memory integrity during strong interactions, we introduce motion- and geometry-grounded memory correction that resolves interaction confusions and suppresses drift. For reliable re-identification after disappearance, we maintain an adaptive context memory that promotes diverse and trustworthy references as long-term identity anchors. Finally, similarity aware spatial pruning optionally selects the memory tokens to retain at cross-attention time, improving efficiency with minimal accuracy loss. LiAM-SAM represents a modular, detector-agnostic, SAM2-based MOT system that achieves state-of-the-art HOTA and IDF1 on the evaluated benchmarks. In association-challenging environments, our ablations show that LiAM improves a detector+SAM2 baseline by +10.5 HOTA, +17.4 AssA, and reduces identity switches by 96%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28078
This work presents a video summarization algorithm based on multi-object tracking and person reidentification. We integrate facial embeddings, 3D body-shape features, and visual appearance into a unified tracking framework. These representations enable hierarchical identity assignment and tracking through bidirectional anchoring, which robustly recovers trajectories under severe occlusion or low visual quality. From these stable trajectories, we generate a compact set of summaries for each identity. We select keyframes using a multi-factor weighting scheme that optimizes biometric clarity, social interaction, and motion dynamics, while Adaptive Non-Maximum Suppression ensures temporal diversity. Evaluation on a custom dataset demonstrates tracking stability, achieving an IDF1 of 97.89% and a MOTA of 95.79%. Compared to Top-K selection, our algorithm also increases visual diversity by 146%, temporal coverage by 89%, and information retrievability by 3.5%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25837
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for EdgeAI perception systems, where accurate object localization and reliable identification enable safe decision-making. Singleagent MOT suffers from occlusions, sensor noise, and partial scene understanding in complex real-world scenarios. While multi-agent systems improve robustness by exploiting shared information, they introduce redundant measurements that lead to false data associations, and still struggle to capture nonlinear object dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose CDKFTrack, a Cluster-aware Data-Driven Kalman Filtering framework for Cooperative 3D MOT. The proposed method first fuses multivehicle 3D LiDAR detections through a Graph Laplacian-based formulation. Then, a cluster-aware redundancy reduction scheme groups spatially related detections and selects representative observations to reduce duplicate inputs to the tracker. The resulting detections are processed by a data-driven Kalman filter that learns object motion dynamics from data, reducing dependence on predefined linear motion assumptions. Furthermore, a wavelet-based temporal refinement module leverages the multiresolution decomposition property of wavelets to attenuate shortterm positional fluctuations and improve trajectory continuity. To the best of our knowledge, CDKF-Track is the first framework to jointly address detection-level fusion redundancy and learnable motion modeling in cooperative 3D MOT. Experimental results on the real-world V2V4Real dataset indicate that CDKF-Track achieves up to 27.99% improvements in tracking accuracy over state-of-the-art multi-agent MOT methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25668
In this work, we present a method for shape reconstruction and tracking from video via agentic analysis-by-synthesis. Unlike prior methods which first estimate dense pixel correspondences and then recover object motion from them, our method infers a structured 3D object model, including its geometry and kinematic structure, and uses this model to optimise object track estimates over time. In our optimisation loop, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) agent iteratively refines shape or generalised pose through a render-and-compare loop, combining coarse visual reasoning with numerical pose optimisation for precise state estimation. This structured formulation enables our method to track through large motion, articulation, and severe occlusion without relying on pixel-matching objectives. Quantitatively, on ARCTIC, our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art 3D point-tracking baselines for articulated objects, and on HOT3D it outperforms all evaluated rigid-object tracking baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24487
Identity association in multi-object tracking (MOT) is vulnerable to partial occlusion, truncated detections, and fluctuating confidence scores. Existing motion-dominant trackers commonly represent occlusion as a scalar penalty. This treatment misses the directional observation bias caused by occlusion: left, right, top, and bottom occlusions distort the location and shape of a detection in different ways. We propose \ours{} (Directional Occlusion-Aware SORT), an online and training-free tracker that models these biases explicitly. First, it infers a soft front--back ordering from box overlap and relative bottom positions, and estimates directional occlusion coverage and depth. It then constructs a mixture of one clean and four directional occlusion observation components. The model uses a five-dimensional observation comprising box center, area, confidence, and aspect ratio, and adapts observation noise to predicted occlusion and detection confidence. The directional mixture likelihood is used in high-confidence association, low-confidence association, and track recovery; ambiguity penalties and local order-consistency swaps further reduce identity errors among nearby objects. On the DanceTrack validation split, \ours{} improves HOTA from 63.00 to 66.34, AssA from 45.10 to 49.57, and IDF1 from 62.19 to 65.28 over OA-SORT with the same detector and evaluation protocol. The gains are concentrated in association quality while detection accuracy remains stable. Additional local evaluations on MOT17 and MOT20 train splits characterize cross-dataset behavior under the same no-ReID tracking protocol.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22706
High-speed tracking of small, fast-moving organisms in their natural environments is important to better understand their behavior and ecology. Traditional frame-based imaging suffers from motion blur due to low temporal resolution, and data storage limitations, propelling a search for more adaptive solutions. Event cameras, which capture changes in brightness at pixel level instead of entire frames, have emerged as a promising solution by increasing temporal resolution and data efficiency. Here, we demonstrate the use of event-based imaging with standard video-based processing methods by converting the asynchronous events into conventional video formats, allowing us to leverage the event camera's enhanced temporal detail to capture intricate insect flight movements and apply established image analysis techniques. Coupling this conversion process with a stereoscopic configuration provides continuous, low-latency, three-dimensional tracking of fast-moving subjects in field conditions. As a result, we substantially mitigate motion artifacts and achieve more accurate representations of animal movements. By making event-based imaging more readily applicable in natural field settings, our method support broader applications across animal behavior and ecological research, agricultural management, and other fields requiring high-fidelity object tracking in the wild.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21354
Spinning frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have been gaining popularity in autonomous vehicle perception on account of their robustness to adverse weather conditions and 360° field of view. Recently, scanning radars have also been shown capable of generating per-azimuth Doppler velocity. In this paper, we investigate whether these Doppler velocity measurements improve spinning radar vehicle detection and tracking performance. For detection, we estimate the ego motion and use it to undo the Doppler range distortion of the radar image before passing it to a network. For tracking, we propose a new way to estimate a per-vehicle velocity and use it as a prior for the tracker's motion model. Since Doppler-enabled spinning radar data is not available in any dataset with ground-truth dynamic object labels, our first contribution is an automatic labelling pipeline that uses an ensemble of fine-tuned off-the-shelf lidar detectors to label all 643 km of the Boreas Road Trip dataset. We then transfer detections to radar, and use over 250 km of vehicle-dense sequences as ground-truth training data. By training and evaluating two state-of-the-art detectors, we show that Doppler undistortion can improve detection accuracy by up to $2.37$ points on mean average precision. Furthermore, we show that the Doppler velocity prior can improve tracking accuracy by $13.68$ points on multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) versus the zero-velocity initialization baseline, while achieving $99.7\%$ of the MOTA obtained using ground-truth velocities as the prior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21000
Embodied visual perception relies on temporally coherent visual experience accumulated through continuous engagement with the environment. However, collecting large-scale egocentric binocular observations together with dense annotations remains costly and difficult. Moreover, visual experience is shaped not only by the environment but also by the embodiment of the observer, including viewing height, field of view, binocular geometry, and motion through the scene. To address these challenges, we present BinoGen, an automated framework for generating large-scale, embodiment-aware egocentric binocular visual experiences in indoor environments. BinoGen jointly models environmental and observer variation through generative scene synthesis, probabilistic object instantiation, appearance randomization, stochastic trajectory generation, and configurable binocular camera setups. The framework produces synchronized binocular videos together with dense multimodal supervision, including depth maps, optical flow, surface normals, semantic maps, object coordinates, and camera poses. Using BinoGen, we construct a dataset comprising more than 20 million annotated images for supervised learning. We demonstrate two complementary utilities of BinoGen. First, incorporating BinoGen data consistently improves real-world visual perception, including depth estimation, object detection, and video object tracking. Second, paired human-inspired and mouse-inspired observations from the same environments enable controlled investigation of how observer embodiment affects perceptual learning. Embodiment-specific adaptation substantially improves performance, while joint training enables a single model to perform competitively across both embodiments. Together, these results demonstrate that large-scale, controllable visual experience can improve embodied perception...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19881
UAV-borne imaging has advanced from megapixel to gigapixel sensors, shifting aerial perception from recognizing individual targets to understanding entire dynamic scenes. We characterize this demand as Wide-area Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding (WSTU), which requires wide-area coverage, per-target resolution, and temporal continuity at once, a combination existing datasets lack. To fill this gap, we introduce an ultra-High-resolution (12768x9564) Airborne Remote-sensing Dataset (HARD) annotated at three levels for object detection, multi-object tracking, and scene-level visual question answering. Ultra-high-resolution imagery raises per-frame processing time to seconds. At that scale latency can no longer be ignored in evaluation. Thus, we propose a latency-aware metric for multi-object tracking called streaming-HOTA (s-HOTA). Extensive baseline experiments show how ultra-high-resolution processing reshapes each task. For detection, the end-to-end pipeline affects accuracy and speed as much as the detector itself does. For tracking, high latency charges the association axis far more unevenly than the detection axis, and association is where pipelines diverge. As a result, the pipeline that performs best offline can lose its lead under s-HOTA. For VQA, vision-language models remain weak at cross-frame identity binding and cannot transfer their single-frame gains to it. Together these findings show that the baselines we evaluate fall short of WSTU. HARD provides the data and the systematic baselines to advance it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18210
Interactive control for video generation is moving from coarse prompts toward fine-grained, physically meaningful manipulation of dynamic scenes. Yet existing controllable methods either require the full control schedule before generation starts, or use pixel-space signals that dictate object positions rather than physical dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose PhysStream, an autoregressive model for physics-grounded image-to-video synthesis that incorporates structured scene memory---positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames---and supports fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals that encode physical quantities, letting the model learn the underlying dynamics. We train our model in two stages: a bidirectional model is first finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model is trained with additional structured scene memory, further improving physical consistency. PhysStream enables interactive, mid-generation control over multi-object tabletop rigid-body scenes---a capability not supported by prior methods---reducing motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines on synthetic benchmarks, and is preferred by human evaluators in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons. Please check our website for more details: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17521
Real-time multi-object tracking systems remain highly vulnerable to full and long-term occlusion, where targets temporarily or completely disappear from the camera's field of view. Conventional trackers may terminate trajectories prematurely, resulting in identity loss and reduced situational awareness in applications such as defense and surveillance. This work proposes an occlusion-robust target tracking framework that maintains target identity and trajectory continuity through the integration of YOLOv11n object detection, Kalman Filter motion prediction, and occlusion-aware appearance-based re-identification. The framework consists of three stages: object detection, position estimation during occlusion, and identity recovery after target reappearance. Six Re-Identification (Re-ID) architectures were evaluated within the same tracking framework under identical conditions, with the Occlusion-Aware Mask Network (OAMN) achieving the best overall performance and therefore selected for the final pipeline. The framework was benchmarked against OccluTrack on the public OVIS dataset, achieving relative improvements of 18.1 percent in Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) and 25.1 percent in Identity F1 Score (IDF1), while reducing identity switches by 12.8 percent. On a custom military dataset simulating surveillance and battlefield-like environments with long-term occlusion, the framework achieved a MOTA of 0.734 and an IDF1 of 0.729, corresponding to relative improvements of 14.2 percent and 5.8 percent over OccluTrack. The system demonstrated strong tracking continuity, robust identity preservation, and reliable trajectory estimation under challenging occlusion conditions, highlighting its effectiveness for defense-related surveillance applications requiring continuous target tracking during visibility loss.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17427