The evolution of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) has increased the need for robust and generalizable algorithms for multi-object tracking. Traditional statistical model-based tracking methods rely on predefined motion models and assumptions about system noise distributions. Although computationally efficient, they often lack adaptability to varying traffic scenarios and require extensive manual design and parameter tuning. To address these issues, we propose a novel 3D multi-object tracking approach for vehicles, HybridTrack, which integrates a data-driven Kalman Filter (KF) within a tracking-by-detection paradigm. In particular, it learns the transition residual and Kalman gain directly from data, which eliminates the need for manual motion and stochastic parameter modeling. Validated on the real-world KITTI dataset, HybridTrack achieves 82.72% HOTA accuracy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our method under different configurations, achieving the fastest processing speed of 112 FPS. Consequently, HybridTrack eliminates the dependency on scene-specific designs while improving performance and maintaining real-time efficiency. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/leandro-svg/HybridTrack.
Recently, several studies have shown that utilizing contextual information to perceive target states is crucial for object tracking. They typically capture context by incorporating multiple video frames. However, these naive frame-context methods fail to consider the importance of each patch within a reference frame, making them susceptible to noise and redundant tokens, which deteriorates tracking performance. To address this challenge, we propose a new token context-aware tracking pipeline named LMTrack, designed to automatically learn high-quality reference tokens for efficient visual tracking. Embracing the principle of Less is More, the core idea of LMTrack is to analyze the importance distribution of all reference tokens, where important tokens are collected, continually attended to, and updated. Specifically, a novel Token Context Memory module is designed to dynamically collect high-quality spatio-temporal information of a target in an autoregressive manner, eliminating redundant background tokens from the reference frames. Furthermore, an effective Unidirectional Token Attention mechanism is designed to establish dependencies between reference tokens and search frame, enabling robust cross-frame association and target localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our tracker, achieving state-of-the-art results on tracking benchmarks such as GOT-10K, TrackingNet, and LaSOT.
In this paper, we propose a simple yet unified single object tracking (SOT) framework, dubbed SUTrack. It consolidates five SOT tasks (RGB-based, RGB-Depth, RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, RGB-Language Tracking) into a unified model trained in a single session. Due to the distinct nature of the data, current methods typically design individual architectures and train separate models for each task. This fragmentation results in redundant training processes, repetitive technological innovations, and limited cross-modal knowledge sharing. In contrast, SUTrack demonstrates that a single model with a unified input representation can effectively handle various common SOT tasks, eliminating the need for task-specific designs and separate training sessions. Additionally, we introduce a task-recognition auxiliary training strategy and a soft token type embedding to further enhance SUTrack's performance with minimal overhead. Experiments show that SUTrack outperforms previous task-specific counterparts across 11 datasets spanning five SOT tasks. Moreover, we provide a range of models catering edge devices as well as high-performance GPUs, striking a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. We hope SUTrack could serve as a strong foundation for further compelling research into unified tracking models. Code and models are available at github.com/chenxin-dlut/SUTrack.
Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) is an important topic in the current tracking field. Its task form is to guide the tracker to track objects that match the language description. Current research mainly focuses on referring multi-object tracking under single-view, which refers to a view sequence or multiple unrelated view sequences. However, in the single-view, some appearances of objects are easily invisible, resulting in incorrect matching of objects with the language description. In this work, we propose a new task, called Cross-view Referring Multi-Object Tracking (CRMOT). It introduces the cross-view to obtain the appearances of objects from multiple views, avoiding the problem of the invisible appearances of objects in RMOT task. CRMOT is a more challenging task of accurately tracking the objects that match the language description and maintaining the identity consistency of objects in each cross-view. To advance CRMOT task, we construct a cross-view referring multi-object tracking benchmark based on CAMPUS and DIVOTrack datasets, named CRTrack. Specifically, it provides 13 different scenes and 221 language descriptions. Furthermore, we propose an end-to-end cross-view referring multi-object tracking method, named CRTracker. Extensive experiments on the CRTrack benchmark verify the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/chen-si-jia/CRMOT.
Multimodal tracking has garnered widespread attention as a result of its ability to effectively address the inherent limitations of traditional RGB tracking. However, existing multimodal trackers mainly focus on the fusion and enhancement of spatial features or merely leverage the sparse temporal relationships between video frames. These approaches do not fully exploit the temporal correlations in multimodal videos, making it difficult to capture the dynamic changes and motion information of targets in complex scenarios. To alleviate this problem, we propose a unified multimodal spatial-temporal tracking approach named STTrack. In contrast to previous paradigms that solely relied on updating reference information, we introduced a temporal state generator (TSG) that continuously generates a sequence of tokens containing multimodal temporal information. These temporal information tokens are used to guide the localization of the target in the next time state, establish long-range contextual relationships between video frames, and capture the temporal trajectory of the target. Furthermore, at the spatial level, we introduced the mamba fusion and background suppression interactive (BSI) modules. These modules establish a dual-stage mechanism for coordinating information interaction and fusion between modalities. Extensive comparisons on five benchmark datasets illustrate that STTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal tracking scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/NJU-PCALab/STTrack.
Effectively constructing context information with long-term dependencies from video sequences is crucial for object tracking. However, the context length constructed by existing work is limited, only considering object information from adjacent frames or video clips, leading to insufficient utilization of contextual information. To address this issue, we propose MambaLCT, which constructs and utilizes target variation cues from the first frame to the current frame for robust tracking. First, a novel unidirectional Context Mamba module is designed to scan frame features along the temporal dimension, gathering target change cues throughout the entire sequence. Specifically, target-related information in frame features is compressed into a hidden state space through selective scanning mechanism. The target information across the entire video is continuously aggregated into target variation cues. Next, we inject the target change cues into the attention mechanism, providing temporal information for modeling the relationship between the template and search frames. The advantage of MambaLCT is its ability to continuously extend the length of the context, capturing complete target change cues, which enhances the stability and robustness of the tracker. Extensive experiments show that long-term context information enhances the model's ability to perceive targets in complex scenarios. MambaLCT achieves new SOTA performance on six benchmarks while maintaining real-time running speeds.
Perception and prediction modules are critical components of autonomous driving systems, enabling vehicles to navigate safely through complex environments. The perception module is responsible for perceiving the environment, including static and dynamic objects, while the prediction module is responsible for predicting the future behavior of these objects. These modules are typically divided into three tasks: object detection, object tracking, and motion prediction. Traditionally, these tasks are developed and optimized independently, with outputs passed sequentially from one to the next. However, this approach has significant limitations: computational resources are not shared across tasks, the lack of joint optimization can amplify errors as they propagate throughout the pipeline, and uncertainty is rarely propagated between modules, resulting in significant information loss. To address these challenges, the joint perception and prediction paradigm has emerged, integrating perception and prediction into a unified model through multi-task learning. This strategy not only overcomes the limitations of previous methods, but also enables the three tasks to have direct access to raw sensor data, allowing richer and more nuanced environmental interpretations. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of joint perception and prediction for autonomous driving. We propose a taxonomy that categorizes approaches based on input representation, scene context modeling, and output representation, highlighting their contributions and limitations. Additionally, we present a qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of existing methods. Finally, we discuss future research directions based on identified gaps in the state-of-the-art.
Contextual information at the video level has become increasingly crucial for visual object tracking. However, existing methods typically use only a few tokens to convey this information, which can lead to information loss and limit their ability to fully capture the context. To address this issue, we propose a new video-level visual object tracking framework called MCITrack. It leverages Mamba's hidden states to continuously record and transmit extensive contextual information throughout the video stream, resulting in more robust object tracking. The core component of MCITrack is the Contextual Information Fusion module, which consists of the mamba layer and the cross-attention layer. The mamba layer stores historical contextual information, while the cross-attention layer integrates this information into the current visual features of each backbone block. This module enhances the model's ability to capture and utilize contextual information at multiple levels through deep integration with the backbone. Experiments demonstrate that MCITrack achieves competitive performance across numerous benchmarks. For instance, it gets 76.6% AUC on LaSOT and 80.0% AO on GOT-10k, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kangben258/MCITrack.
Tracking multiple tiny objects is highly challenging due to their weak appearance and limited features. Existing multi-object tracking algorithms generally focus on single-modality scenes, and overlook the complementary characteristics of tiny objects captured by multiple remote sensors. To enhance tracking performance by integrating complementary information from multiple sources, we propose a novel framework called {HGT-Track (Heterogeneous Graph Transformer based Multi-Tiny-Object Tracking)}. Specifically, we first employ a Transformer-based encoder to embed images from different modalities. Subsequently, we utilize Heterogeneous Graph Transformer to aggregate spatial and temporal information from multiple modalities to generate detection and tracking features. Additionally, we introduce a target re-detection module (ReDet) to ensure tracklet continuity by maintaining consistency across different modalities. Furthermore, this paper introduces the first benchmark VT-Tiny-MOT (Visible-Thermal Tiny Multi-Object Tracking) for RGB-T fused multiple tiny object tracking. Extensive experiments are conducted on VT-Tiny-MOT, and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of MOTA (Multiple-Object Tracking Accuracy) and ID-F1 score. The code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/xuqingyu26/HGTMT.
In the context of medical Augmented Reality (AR) applications, object tracking is a key challenge and requires a significant amount of annotation masks. As segmentation foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) begin to emerge, zero-shot segmentation requires only minimal human participation obtaining high-quality object masks. We introduce a HoloLens-Object-Labeling (HOLa) Unity and Python application based on the SAM-Track algorithm that offers fully automatic single object annotation for HoloLens 2 while requiring minimal human participation. HOLa does not have to be adjusted to a specific image appearance and could thus alleviate AR research in any application field. We evaluate HOLa for different degrees of image complexity in open liver surgery and in medical phantom experiments. Using HOLa for image annotation can increase the labeling speed by more than 500 times while providing Dice scores between 0.875 and 0.982, which are comparable to human annotators. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/mschwimmbeck/HOLa
3D single object tracking is essential in autonomous driving and robotics. Existing methods often struggle with sparse and incomplete point cloud scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a Multimodal-guided Virtual Cues Projection (MVCP) scheme that generates virtual cues to enrich sparse point clouds. Additionally, we introduce an enhanced tracker MVCTrack based on the generated virtual cues. Specifically, the MVCP scheme seamlessly integrates RGB sensors into LiDAR-based systems, leveraging a set of 2D detections to create dense 3D virtual cues that significantly improve the sparsity of point clouds. These virtual cues can naturally integrate with existing LiDAR-based 3D trackers, yielding substantial performance gains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance on the NuScenes dataset.
Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) requires tracking and segmenting an object throughout a video according to a given natural language expression, demanding both complex motion understanding and the alignment of visual representations with language descriptions. Given these challenges, the recently proposed Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) emerges as a potential candidate due to its ability to generate coherent segmentation mask tracks across video frames, and provide an inherent spatio-temporal objectness in its object token representations. In this paper, we introduce SOLA (Selection by Object Language Alignment), a novel framework that leverages SAM2 object tokens as compact video-level object representations, which are aligned with language features through a lightweight track selection module. To effectively facilitate this alignment, we propose an IoU-based pseudo-labeling strategy, which bridges the modality gap between SAM2 representations with language features. Extensive experiments show that SOLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MeViS dataset and demonstrate that SOLA offers an effective solution for RVOS. Our project page is available at: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/SOLA.
Recent advances in video question answering (VideoQA) offer promising applications, especially in traffic monitoring, where efficient video interpretation is critical. Within ITS, answering complex, real-time queries like "How many red cars passed in the last 10 minutes?" or "Was there an incident between 3:00 PM and 3:05 PM?" enhances situational awareness and decision-making. Despite progress in vision-language models, VideoQA remains challenging, especially in dynamic environments involving multiple objects and intricate spatiotemporal relationships. This study evaluates state-of-the-art VideoQA models using non-benchmark synthetic and real-world traffic sequences. The framework leverages GPT-4o to assess accuracy, relevance, and consistency across basic detection, temporal reasoning, and decomposition queries. VideoLLaMA-2 excelled with 57% accuracy, particularly in compositional reasoning and consistent answers. However, all models, including VideoLLaMA-2, faced limitations in multi-object tracking, temporal coherence, and complex scene interpretation, highlighting gaps in current architectures. These findings underscore VideoQA's potential in traffic monitoring but also emphasize the need for improvements in multi-object tracking, temporal reasoning, and compositional capabilities. Enhancing these areas could make VideoQA indispensable for incident detection, traffic flow management, and responsive urban planning. The study's code and framework are open-sourced for further exploration: https://github.com/joe-rabbit/VideoQA_Pilot_Study
In this paper, we present a novel benchmark, GSOT3D, that aims at facilitating development of generic 3D single object tracking (SOT) in the wild. Specifically, GSOT3D offers 620 sequences with 123K frames, and covers a wide selection of 54 object categories. Each sequence is offered with multiple modalities, including the point cloud (PC), RGB image, and depth. This allows GSOT3D to support various 3D tracking tasks, such as single-modal 3D SOT on PC and multi-modal 3D SOT on RGB-PC or RGB-D, and thus greatly broadens research directions for 3D object tracking. To provide highquality per-frame 3D annotations, all sequences are labeled manually with multiple rounds of meticulous inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, GSOT3D is the largest benchmark dedicated to various generic 3D object tracking tasks. To understand how existing 3D trackers perform and to provide comparisons for future research on GSOT3D, we assess eight representative point cloud-based tracking models. Our evaluation results exhibit that these models heavily degrade on GSOT3D, and more efforts are required for robust and generic 3D object tracking. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a simple yet effective generic 3D tracker, named PROT3D, that localizes the target object via a progressive spatial-temporal network and outperforms all current solutions by a large margin. By releasing GSOT3D, we expect to advance further 3D tracking in future research and applications. Our benchmark and model as well as the evaluation results will be publicly released at our webpage https://github.com/ailovejinx/GSOT3D.
Memory-based trackers are video object segmentation methods that form the target model by concatenating recently tracked frames into a memory buffer and localize the target by attending the current image to the buffered frames. While already achieving top performance on many benchmarks, it was the recent release of SAM2 that placed memory-based trackers into focus of the visual object tracking community. Nevertheless, modern trackers still struggle in the presence of distractors. We argue that a more sophisticated memory model is required, and propose a new distractor-aware memory model for SAM2 and an introspection-based update strategy that jointly addresses the segmentation accuracy as well as tracking robustness. The resulting tracker is denoted as SAM2.1++. We also propose a new distractor-distilled DiDi dataset to study the distractor problem better. SAM2.1++ outperforms SAM2.1 and related SAM memory extensions on seven benchmarks and sets a solid new state-of-the-art on six of them.
Night unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is impeded by the challenges of poor illumination, with previous daylight-optimized methods demonstrating suboptimal performance in low-light conditions, limiting the utility of UAV applications. To this end, we propose an efficient mamba-based tracker, leveraging dual enhancement techniques to boost night UAV tracking. The mamba-based low-light enhancer, equipped with an illumination estimator and a damage restorer, achieves global image enhancement while preserving the details and structure of low-light images. Additionally, we advance a cross-modal mamba network to achieve efficient interactive learning between vision and language modalities. Extensive experiments showcase that our method achieves advanced performance and exhibits significantly improved computation and memory efficiency. For instance, our method is 2.8$\times$ faster than CiteTracker and reduces 50.2$\%$ GPU memory. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse visual tasks, including image recognition, video understanding, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) when explicitly trained for these tasks. Despite these advances, we find that current VLMs lack a fundamental cognitive ability: learning to localize objects in a scene by taking into account the context. In this work, we focus on the task of few-shot personalized localization, where a model is given a small set of annotated images (in-context examples) -- each with a category label and bounding box -- and is tasked with localizing the same object type in a query image. To provoke personalized localization abilities in models, we present a data-centric solution that fine-tunes them using carefully curated data from video object tracking datasets. By leveraging sequences of frames tracking the same object across multiple shots, we simulate instruction-tuning dialogues that promote context awareness. To reinforce this, we introduce a novel regularization technique that replaces object labels with pseudo-names, ensuring the model relies on visual context rather than prior knowledge. Our method significantly enhances few-shot localization performance without sacrificing generalization, as demonstrated on several benchmarks tailored to personalized localization. This work is the first to explore and benchmark personalized few-shot localization for VLMs, laying a foundation for future research in context-driven vision-language applications. The code for our project is available at https://github.com/SivanDoveh/IPLoc
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) in thermal imaging presents unique challenges due to the lack of visual features and the complexity of motion patterns. This paper introduces an innovative approach to improve MOT in the thermal domain by developing a novel box association method that utilizes both thermal object identity and motion similarity. Our method merges thermal feature sparsity and dynamic object tracking, enabling more accurate and robust MOT performance. Additionally, we present a new dataset comprised of a large-scale collection of thermal and RGB images captured in diverse urban environments, serving as both a benchmark for our method and a new resource for thermal imaging. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, showing significant improvements in tracking accuracy and robustness under various conditions. Our findings suggest that incorporating thermal identity with motion data enhances MOT performance. The newly collected dataset and source code is available at https://github.com/wassimea/thermalMOT
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has demonstrated strong performance in object segmentation tasks but faces challenges in visual object tracking, particularly when managing crowded scenes with fast-moving or self-occluding objects. Furthermore, the fixed-window memory approach in the original model does not consider the quality of memories selected to condition the image features for the next frame, leading to error propagation in videos. This paper introduces SAMURAI, an enhanced adaptation of SAM 2 specifically designed for visual object tracking. By incorporating temporal motion cues with the proposed motion-aware memory selection mechanism, SAMURAI effectively predicts object motion and refines mask selection, achieving robust, accurate tracking without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. SAMURAI operates in real-time and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance across diverse benchmark datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize without fine-tuning. In evaluations, SAMURAI achieves significant improvements in success rate and precision over existing trackers, with a 7.1% AUC gain on LaSOT$_{\text{ext}}$ and a 3.5% AO gain on GOT-10k. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods on LaSOT, underscoring its robustness in complex tracking scenarios and its potential for real-world applications in dynamic environments.
Multi-object tracking in sports scenarios has become one of the focal points in computer vision, experiencing significant advancements through the integration of deep learning techniques. Despite these breakthroughs, challenges remain, such as accurately re-identifying players upon re-entry into the scene and minimizing ID switches. In this paper, we propose an appearance-based global tracklet association algorithm designed to enhance tracking performance by splitting tracklets containing multiple identities and connecting tracklets seemingly from the same identity. This method can serve as a plug-and-play refinement tool for any multi-object tracker to further boost their performance. The proposed method achieved a new state-of-the-art performance on the SportsMOT dataset with HOTA score of 81.04%. Similarly, on the SoccerNet dataset, our method enhanced multiple trackers' performance, consistently increasing the HOTA score from 79.41% to 83.11%. These significant and consistent improvements across different trackers and datasets underscore our proposed method's potential impact on the application of sports player tracking. We open-source our project codebase at https://github.com/sjc042/gta-link.git.