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 when integrated into the RobMOT framework, achieving a MOTA of 92.27\%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23604
In autonomous racing, fast detection of other participants' movements is required to plan safe, collision-free trajectories with non-cooperative opponents. LiDAR detection is inherently slower and harder to deploy on edge devices than vision methods, causing delayed detections that limit object tracking performance during high-dynamic maneuvering. Utilizing monocular 3D detection enables an easy-to-deploy, low-latency detection of other participants on the racetrack. We present SPARK, a single-camera pose-estimation algorithm for autonomous racing using keypoint detection. It achieves long-range detection with high accuracy, exceeding the performance of state-of-the-art monocular camera detection algorithms while maintaining lower latency. By employing well-optimized YOLO models and leveraging the fixed geometry in the autonomous racing domain, the algorithm also exhibits low latency and resource usage. We evaluate the performance of our approach on real-world autonomous racing data and compare it to state-of-the-art LiDAR and camera detection algorithms. The source code is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17936
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 this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14094
Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are 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 improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13033
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09167
Egocentric RGB-D videos offer a natural source of human dexterous manipulation demonstrations, but existing data is difficult to use for robot learning because object pose, geometry, and contact information are often missing or require pre-scanned object assets. We present EgoAERO, the first framework that learns dexterous manipulation from a single egocentric RGB-D human demonstration without object assets. EgoAERO reconstructs contact-consistent hand-object trajectories through asset-free object tracking and reconstruction, ego motion compensation, and adaptive contact optimization, then converts them into robot policies using two-stage residual learning. We further introduce an online quality assessment mechanism and construct EgoDex-R, a large-scale egocentric dataset with 4.3M RGB-D frames for dexterous policy learning. Simulation and real-world experiments show that EgoAERO enables single-demonstration dexterous manipulation and achieves downstream performance close to CAD-based reconstructions on HOI4D.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08057
LiDAR-based 3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) typically relies solely on geometric information, which is often insufficient to distinguish between targets during prolonged occlusions or in crowded human-populated environments. While integrating RGB-based Re-Identification (ReID) offers a theoretical solution for preserving identity context, existing approaches often rely on computationally expensive parallel detectors that hinder real-time robot responsiveness. This work presents a systematic study of image-based ReID in online 3D MOT, utilizing a lightweight projection-based framework to decouple geometric and appearance modeling for mobile robots. A comprehensive analysis of feature extraction architectures is conducted, employing lightweight CNNs and Vision Transformers, and evaluating various multi-modal data association strategies to balance computational latency with robust tracking. Experiments on the Pedestrian class of the KITTI dataset reveal that naive linear fusion, of appearance and motion costs, degrades performance due to visual noise. Conversely, a cascaded matching strategy successfully recovers occluded tracks without compromising overall precision, effectively preventing identity switches to maintain human-robot interaction continuity. We show that lightweight architectures can offer an optimal trade-off between the low latency required for safe navigation and the discriminative power needed for social awareness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07233
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05587
Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05160
Instrumented bicycle studies have produced direct field evidence on vehicle passing behavior, but extracting overtaking events from continuous rear-facing video has remained dependent on manual, frame-by-frame annotation. This bottleneck constrains sample sizes and limits naturalistic cycling safety research. We present a geometry-informed computer vision pipeline that automates overtaking event detection from a single bicycle-mounted camera without multi-sensor configurations or explicit camera calibration. The system combines RT-DETR object detection with ByteTrack multi-object tracking through a three-stage geometric validation module enforcing bearing angle trend, apparent size growth, and spatial confirmation criteria derived from perspective projection principles. Validated on 315 manually annotated real-world overtaking events from urban roads in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the pipeline achieved 97.8% recall with zero false positives. The system identified overtaking intentions a mean of 2.44 seconds before vehicle passage, with 84.1% of events exceeding the 1.5-second human reaction time threshold, demonstrating feasibility for active cyclist warning. Lateral passing distance measurements from 96 events revealed 33.3% of passes below the 5-foot (152.4 cm) threshold, consistent with non-compliance rates in prior field and self-reported studies. A preliminary calibration-free lateral distance estimation approach using bounding box geometric features achieved mean absolute errors of 13-14 cm under leave-one-out cross-validation, sufficient to distinguish close passes from standard passes for safety categorization. By automating event isolation from consumer-grade footage, the system removes the primary annotation bottleneck of instrumented bicycle research and provides a scalable foundation for vehicle-bicycle interaction analysis across larger datasets and diverse urban environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23699
The real-time hardships of video processing seriously limit the usage of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) with application in dynamic traffic monitoring settings. High-fidelity recognition of unconstrained variables, e.g. drastic variations in illumination, acute camera scans, high vehicle speeds, and harsh physical concealment, is a problem that often leads to disjointed tracking paths and poor Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rates. In order to mitigate these weaknesses, the study proposes a 5 stage, end-to-end algorithmic pipeline, encompassing a smooth transition between deep learning based object detection, multi-object tracking which is kinematic in nature, and geometry temporal data interpolation. The suggested architecture takes advantage of a very powerful YOLOv8 nano model to localize the vehicle at the first stage and then Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) algorithm is used to build spatial-temporal links between frames. Another, more specific typology of YOLOv8 object detectors the license plate area, channeling the sliced array to an EasyOCR chain under the limitations of positional syntax verification. More importantly, an offline interpolation mechanism of temporal bounding box is initiated to recast fragmented paths.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04684
Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation (MOTS) to operate reliably in dynamic environments, ensuring consistent object identities and precise mask-level delineation. Foundation models such as SAM2 have shown strong zero-shot generalization for segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS is limited by unreliable track association and false-positive propagation. This work introduces Seg2Track++, a framework that integrates instance segmentation with SAM2 and a novel track management module to perform zero-shot MOTS with enhanced temporal consistency. Tracks are associated using Mask Centroid Distance (MCD) and Confidence-Aware Cost Modulation (CCM), while Probabilistic Track Validation (PTV) employs a Bernoulli filter to validate track existence and suppress ghost tracks. Experimental results on KITTI MOTS demonstrate improved identity preservation, reduced false-positive propagation, and robust track management without fine-tuning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03875
Kalman filter (KF)-based multi-object tracking (MOT) remains a strong baseline for autonomous driving due to its strong performance, computational efficiency and interpretability. In most practical systems, the process noise and measurement noise covariances are defined globally and shared across object classes, presuming identical uncertainty characteristics across heterogeneous traffic participants. This work revisits this assumption and proposes CANMOT, a class-aware and object-aligned noise modeling framework for KF-based 3D MOT. Class-specific diagonal process and measurement covariance matrices are introduced and optionally expressed in the object coordinate frame to preserve longitudinal-lateral anisotropy. Systematic experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that class-aware and object-aligned noise modeling improves tracking performance and substantially reduces identity switches compared to state-of-the-art (SotA). In addition, the consistency of the estimated uncertainty is analyzed using the Average Normalized Estimation Error Squared (ANEES) and $\chi^2$-based violation tests. The results reveal severe overconfidence in standard KF-based MOT baselines. While the proposed formulation improves calibration without modifying the underlying filtering framework, it still exhibits substantial inconsistency, highlighting the need for further research in this area. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03590
Human demonstrations provide strong priors for robot manipulation, yet it is non-trivial to transfer them to execute on real robots due to the kinematic gap. In dexterous manipulation, it remains challenging to track long-horizon, contact-rich sequences even in simulators: a reference-tracking policy must keep objects on their target trajectories while preserving demonstrated joint motion and contact timing. Existing approaches often rely on hand-crafted reward tuning that require per-sequence tuning and break under limited interaction budgets. We introduce ConTrack, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that scales with tracking data. ConTrack treats object tracking as a constraint and allocates remaining control authority to motion fidelity, which allows it to adapt task--style trade-offs online using a dual-variable update. In addition, ConTrack also stabilizes long-horizon learning with an adaptive mid-trajectory reset library that reuses policy-reachable simulator states. Our qualitative and quantitative results in simulation tracking and real robot demonstrate that ConTrack improves success and object pose accuracy significantly over prior arts while preserving joint and contact fidelity. Website: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03177
Self-supervised video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aims to discover distinct objects and associate them across time, whereas self-supervised Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) focuses on associating pre-defined object detections or segmentations. Although well-established in MOT, Cycle Consistency (CC) cannot naively or explicitly apply to the latent slot space of OCL. Unlike the deterministic and ideal object representations in MOT, OCL slots are inherently stochastic and ambiguous due to non-unique scene decompositions. Enforcing explicit cycle consistency (ECC) on slots imposes rigid mean seeking. This severely penalizes the model for exploring alternative but equally valid decompositions, thereby driving towards feature collapse. To resolve this dilemma, we propose \textit{Implicit Cycle Consistency (ICC)}, which shifts the cycle-consistency constraint from the restrictive slot space to the continuous reconstruction manifold, encouraging slots to reach a soft consensus on collectively interpreting the visual scene rather than forcing rigid point-to-point feature alignment. Extensive experiments on complex video OCL benchmarks demonstrate that ICC avoids feature collapse and outperforms ECC baselines. Our source code, model checkpoints and training logs are provided on this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30211
Severe image degradation under low-light nighttime conditions constitutes a core bottleneck preventing all-day applications for UAV-based single object tracking. Existing image enhancement methods often struggle to distinguish between target and background regions, which can easily lead to amplified background noise or compromise target features. To overcome this limitation, we propose TAE, a target-aware low-light enhancement framework tailored for nighttime object tracking. Guided explicitly by weak supervisory signals from tracking bounding boxes, the framework performs region-aware enhancement to ensure operations focus on the target area. It further adopts an adaptive RGB multi-curve fusion mechanism to achieve refined modeling and adaptive adjustment across different regions. To facilitate research in this domain, we also contribute DarkSOT, a new benchmark for nighttime UAV tracking, comprising 268 sequences across 9 target categories. Experimental results on the DarkSOT and UAVDark135 demonstrate that TAE significantly improves tracking performance in low-light nighttime scenarios, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization. The DarkSOT dataset is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29558
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26933
Accurate interpretation of street-level imagery is essential for large-scale urban mapping and the creation of Spatial Digital Twin (SDT) environments. This work presents a unified framework for joint 2D-3D segmentation and association that integrates visual semantics with multi-view geometric reasoning. Unlike conventional approaches that rely heavily on sequential frames for temporal tracking, our method leverages zero-shot detection and segmentation together with structure-from-motion reconstruction to establish stable cross-view correspondences. A 3D-driven association mechanism replaces traditional 2D multi-object tracking, using geometric consistency to guide identity preservation across wide-baseline viewpoints and varying imaging conditions. By combining 2D texture cues with global 3D context, the proposed pipeline is well-suited for scalable street-level processing and can be used for a variety of object types. Experiments demonstrate substantially improved coverage of ground-truth sequences and more robust identity retention compared to state-of-the-art 2D-only tracking methods, achieving a 22% performance gain in challenging urban scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26725
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 this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25538
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23523