Tracking small, agile multi-objects (SMOT), such as birds, from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspective is a highly challenging computer vision task. The difficulty stems from three main sources: the extreme scarcity of target appearance features, the complex motion entanglement caused by the combined dynamics of the camera and the targets themselves, and the frequent occlusions and identity ambiguity arising from dense flocking behavior. This paper details our championship-winning solution in the MVA 2025 "Finding Birds" Small Multi-Object Tracking Challenge (SMOT4SB), which adopts the tracking-by-detection paradigm with targeted innovations at both the detection and association levels. On the detection side, we propose a systematic training enhancement framework named \textbf{SliceTrain}. This framework, through the synergy of 'deterministic full-coverage slicing' and 'slice-level stochastic augmentation, effectively addresses the problem of insufficient learning for small objects in high-resolution image training. On the tracking side, we designed a robust tracker that is completely independent of appearance information. By integrating a \textbf{motion direction maintenance (EMA)} mechanism and an \textbf{adaptive similarity metric} combining \textbf{bounding box expansion and distance penalty} into the OC-SORT framework, our tracker can stably handle irregular motion and maintain target identities. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SMOT4SB public test set, reaching an SO-HOTA score of \textbf{55.205}, which fully validates the effectiveness and advancement of our framework in solving complex real-world SMOT problems. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/Salvatore-Love/YOLOv8-SMOT.
Small Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT) is particularly challenging when targets occupy only a few dozen pixels, rendering detection and appearance-based association unreliable. Building on the success of the MVA2023 SOD4SB challenge, this paper introduces the SMOT4SB challenge, which leverages temporal information to address limitations of single-frame detection. Our three main contributions are: (1) the SMOT4SB dataset, consisting of 211 UAV video sequences with 108,192 annotated frames under diverse real-world conditions, designed to capture motion entanglement where both camera and targets move freely in 3D; (2) SO-HOTA, a novel metric combining Dot Distance with HOTA to mitigate the sensitivity of IoU-based metrics to small displacements; and (3) a competitive MVA2025 challenge with 78 participants and 308 submissions, where the winning method achieved a 5.1x improvement over the baseline. This work lays a foundation for advancing SMOT in UAV scenarios with applications in bird strike avoidance, agriculture, fisheries, and ecological monitoring.
Object tracking in inland waterways plays a crucial role in safe and cost-effective applications, including waterborne transportation, sightseeing tours, environmental monitoring and surface rescue. Our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), equipped with a 4D radar, a monocular camera, a GPS, and an IMU, delivers robust tracking capabilities in complex waterborne environments. By leveraging these sensors, our USV collected comprehensive object tracking data, which we present as USVTrack, the first 4D radar-camera tracking dataset tailored for autonomous driving in new generation waterborne transportation systems. Our USVTrack dataset presents rich scenarios, featuring diverse various waterways, varying times of day, and multiple weather and lighting conditions. Moreover, we present a simple but effective radar-camera matching method, termed RCM, which can be plugged into popular two-stage association trackers. Experimental results utilizing RCM demonstrate the effectiveness of the radar-camera matching in improving object tracking accuracy and reliability for autonomous driving in waterborne environments. The USVTrack dataset is public on https://usvtrack.github.io.
This paper presents enhancements to the SAM2 framework for video object tracking task, addressing challenges such as occlusions, background clutter, and target reappearance. We introduce a hierarchical motion estimation strategy, combining lightweight linear prediction with selective non-linear refinement to improve tracking accuracy without requiring additional training. In addition, we optimize the memory bank by distinguishing long-term and short-term memory frames, enabling more reliable tracking under long-term occlusions and appearance changes. Experimental results show consistent improvements across different model scales. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on LaSOT and LaSOText with the large model, achieving 9.6% and 7.2% relative improvements in AUC over the original SAM2, and demonstrates even larger relative gains on smaller models, highlighting the effectiveness of our trainless, low-overhead improvements for boosting long-term tracking performance. The code is available at https://github.com/LouisFinner/HiM2SAM.
Visual object tracking has gained promising progress in past decades. Most of the existing approaches focus on learning target representation in well-conditioned daytime data, while for the unconstrained real-world scenarios with adverse weather conditions, e.g. nighttime or foggy environment, the tremendous domain shift leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose UMDATrack, which is capable of maintaining high-quality target state prediction under various adverse weather conditions within a unified domain adaptation framework. Specifically, we first use a controllable scenario generator to synthesize a small amount of unlabeled videos (less than 2% frames in source daytime datasets) in multiple weather conditions under the guidance of different text prompts. Afterwards, we design a simple yet effective domain-customized adapter (DCA), allowing the target objects' representation to rapidly adapt to various weather conditions without redundant model updating. Furthermore, to enhance the localization consistency between source and target domains, we propose a target-aware confidence alignment module (TCA) following optimal transport theorem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMDATrack can surpass existing advanced visual trackers and lead new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/Z-Z188/UMDATrack.
The critical perception capabilities of EdgeAI systems, such as autonomous vehicles, are required to be resilient against adversarial threats, by enabling accurate identification and localization of multiple objects in the scene over time, mitigating their impact. Single-agent tracking offers resilience to adversarial attacks but lacks situational awareness, underscoring the need for multi-agent cooperation to enhance context understanding and robustness. This paper proposes a novel mitigation framework on 3D LiDAR scene against adversarial noise by tracking objects based on least-squares graph on multi-agent adversarial bounding boxes. Specifically, we employ the least-squares graph tool to reduce the induced positional error of each detection's centroid utilizing overlapped bounding boxes on a fully connected graph via differential coordinates and anchor points. Hence, the multi-vehicle detections are fused and refined mitigating the adversarial impact, and associated with existing tracks in two stages performing tracking to further suppress the adversarial threat. An extensive evaluation study on the real-world V2V4Real dataset demonstrates that the proposed method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art single and multi-agent tracking frameworks by up to 23.3% under challenging adversarial conditions, operating as a resilient approach without relying on additional defense mechanisms.
Prompt-learning-based multi-modal trackers have achieved promising progress by employing lightweight visual adapters to incorporate auxiliary modality features into frozen foundation models. However, existing approaches often struggle to learn reliable prompts due to limited exploitation of critical cues across frequency and temporal domains. In this paper, we propose a novel visual and memory dual adapter (VMDA) to construct more robust and discriminative representations for multi-modal tracking. Specifically, we develop a simple but effective visual adapter that adaptively transfers discriminative cues from auxiliary modality to dominant modality by jointly modeling the frequency, spatial, and channel-wise features. Additionally, we design the memory adapter inspired by the human memory mechanism, which stores global temporal cues and performs dynamic update and retrieval operations to ensure the consistent propagation of reliable temporal information across video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the various multi-modal tracking tasks, including RGB-Thermal, RGB-Depth, and RGB-Event tracking. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xuboyue1999/mmtrack.git.
Combining traditional RGB cameras with bio-inspired event cameras for robust object tracking has garnered increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing multimodal tracking algorithms depend heavily on high-complexity Vision Transformer architectures for feature extraction and fusion across modalities. This not only leads to substantial computational overhead but also limits the effectiveness of cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose an efficient RGB-Event object tracking framework based on the linear-complexity Vision Mamba network, termed Mamba-FETrack V2. Specifically, we first design a lightweight Prompt Generator that utilizes embedded features from each modality, together with a shared prompt pool, to dynamically generate modality-specific learnable prompt vectors. These prompts, along with the modality-specific embedded features, are then fed into a Vision Mamba-based FEMamba backbone, which facilitates prompt-guided feature extraction, cross-modal interaction, and fusion in a unified manner. Finally, the fused representations are passed to the tracking head for accurate target localization. Extensive experimental evaluations on multiple RGB-Event tracking benchmarks, including short-term COESOT dataset and long-term datasets, i.e., FE108 and FELT V2, demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of the proposed tracking framework. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_FETrack
Visual single object tracking aims to continuously localize and estimate the scale of a target in subsequent video frames, given only its initial state in the first frame. This task has traditionally been framed as a template matching problem, evolving through major phases including correlation filters, two-stream networks, and one-stream networks with significant progress achieved. However, these methods typically require explicit classification and regression modeling, depend on supervised training with large-scale datasets, and are limited to the single task of tracking, lacking flexibility. In recent years, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly. Open-source models like Qwen2.5-VL, a flagship MLLMs with strong foundational capabilities, demonstrate excellent performance in grounding tasks. This has spurred interest in applying such models directly to visual tracking. However, experiments reveal that Qwen2.5-VL struggles with template matching between image pairs (i.e., tracking tasks). Inspired by deepseek-R1, we fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL using the group relative policy optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning method on a small-scale dataset with a rule-based reward function. The resulting model, R1-Track, achieved notable performance on the GOT-10k benchmark. R1-Track supports flexible initialization via bounding boxes or text descriptions while retaining most of the original model's general capabilities. And we further discuss potential improvements for R1-Track. This rough technical report summarizes our findings as of May 2025.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a core task in computer vision that involves detecting objects in video frames and associating them across time. The rise of deep learning has significantly advanced MOT, particularly within the tracking-by-detection paradigm, which remains the dominant approach. Advancements in modern deep learning-based methods accelerated in 2022 with the introduction of ByteTrack for tracking-by-detection and MOTR for end-to-end tracking. Our survey provides an in-depth analysis of deep learning-based MOT methods, systematically categorizing tracking-by-detection approaches into five groups: joint detection and embedding, heuristic-based, motion-based, affinity learning, and offline methods. In addition, we examine end-to-end tracking methods and compare them with existing alternative approaches. We evaluate the performance of recent trackers across multiple benchmarks and specifically assess their generality by comparing results across different domains. Our findings indicate that heuristic-based methods achieve state-of-the-art results on densely populated datasets with linear object motion, while deep learning-based association methods, in both tracking-by-detection and end-to-end approaches, excel in scenarios with complex motion patterns.
This paper presents a generalization of the trajectory general optimal sub-pattern assignment (GOSPA) metric for evaluating multi-object tracking algorithms that provide trajectory estimates with track-level uncertainties. This metric builds on the recently introduced probabilistic GOSPA metric to account for both the existence and state estimation uncertainties of individual object states. Similar to trajectory GOSPA (TGOSPA), it can be formulated as a multidimensional assignment problem, and its linear programming relaxation--also a valid metric--is computable in polynomial time. Additionally, this metric retains the interpretability of TGOSPA, and we show that its decomposition yields intuitive costs terms associated to expected localization error and existence probability mismatch error for properly detected objects, expected missed and false detection error, and track switch error. The effectiveness of the proposed metric is demonstrated through a simulation study.
We introduce a robust framework, RGBTrack, for real-time 6D pose estimation and tracking that operates solely on RGB data, thereby eliminating the need for depth input for such dynamic and precise object pose tracking tasks. Building on the FoundationPose architecture, we devise a novel binary search strategy combined with a render-and-compare mechanism to efficiently infer depth and generate robust pose hypotheses from true-scale CAD models. To maintain stable tracking in dynamic scenarios, including rapid movements and occlusions, RGBTrack integrates state-of-the-art 2D object tracking (XMem) with a Kalman filter and a state machine for proactive object pose recovery. In addition, RGBTrack's scale recovery module dynamically adapts CAD models of unknown scale using an initial depth estimate, enabling seamless integration with modern generative reconstruction techniques. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that RGBTrack's novel depth-free approach achieves competitive accuracy and real-time performance, making it a promising practical solution candidate for application areas including robotics, augmented reality, and computer vision. The source code for our implementation will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GreatenAnoymous/RGBTrack.git.
Single-modality object tracking (e.g., RGB-only) encounters difficulties in challenging imaging conditions, such as low illumination and adverse weather conditions. To solve this, multimodal tracking (e.g., RGB-T models) aims to leverage complementary data such as thermal infrared features. While recent Vision Transformer-based multimodal trackers achieve strong performance, they are often computationally expensive due to large model sizes. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight RGB-T tracking algorithm based on Mobile Vision Transformers (MobileViT). Our tracker introduces a progressive fusion framework that jointly learns intra-modal and inter-modal interactions between the template and search regions using separable attention. This design produces effective feature representations that support more accurate target localization while achieving a small model size and fast inference speed. Compared to state-of-the-art efficient multimodal trackers, our model achieves comparable accuracy while offering significantly lower parameter counts (less than 4 million) and the fastest GPU inference speed of 122 frames per second. This paper is the first to propose a tracker using Mobile Vision Transformers for RGB-T tracking and multimodal tracking at large. Tracker code and model weights will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Object detection and identification is surely a fundamental topic in the computer vision field; it plays a crucial role in many applications such as object tracking, industrial robots control, image retrieval, etc. We propose a feature-based approach for detecting and identifying distorted occurrences of a given template in a scene image by incremental grouping of feature matches between the image and the template. For this purpose, we consider the Delaunay triangulation of template features as an useful tool through which to be guided in this iterative approach. The triangulation is treated as a graph and, starting from a single triangle, neighboring nodes are considered and the corresponding features are identified; then matches related to them are evaluated to determine if they are worthy to be grouped. This evaluation is based on local consistency criteria derived from geometric and photometric properties of local features. Our solution allows the identification of the object in situations where geometric models (e.g. homography) does not hold, thus enable the detection of objects such that the template is non planar or when it is planar but appears distorted in the image. We show that our approach performs just as well or better than application of homography-based RANSAC in scenarios in which distortion is nearly absent, while when the deformation becomes relevant our method shows better description performance.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lag behind Large Language Models due to the scarcity of annotated datasets, as creating paired visual-textual annotations is labor-intensive and expensive. To address this bottleneck, we introduce SAM2Auto, the first fully automated annotation pipeline for video datasets requiring no human intervention or dataset-specific training. Our approach consists of two key components: SMART-OD, a robust object detection system that combines automatic mask generation with open-world object detection capabilities, and FLASH (Frame-Level Annotation and Segmentation Handler), a multi-object real-time video instance segmentation (VIS) that maintains consistent object identification across video frames even with intermittent detection gaps. Unlike existing open-world detection methods that require frame-specific hyperparameter tuning and suffer from numerous false positives, our system employs statistical approaches to minimize detection errors while ensuring consistent object tracking throughout entire video sequences. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that SAM2Auto achieves comparable accuracy to manual annotation while dramatically reducing annotation time and eliminating labor costs. The system successfully handles diverse datasets without requiring retraining or extensive parameter adjustments, making it a practical solution for large-scale dataset creation. Our work establishes a new baseline for automated video annotation and provides a pathway for accelerating VLM development by addressing the fundamental dataset bottleneck that has constrained progress in vision-language understanding.
Few-shot segmentation aims to segment unseen object categories from just a handful of annotated examples. This requires mechanisms that can both identify semantically related objects across images and accurately produce segmentation masks. We note that Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), with its prompt-and-propagate mechanism, offers both strong segmentation capabilities and a built-in feature matching process. However, we show that its representations are entangled with task-specific cues optimized for object tracking, which impairs its use for tasks requiring higher level semantic understanding. Our key insight is that, despite its class-agnostic pretraining, SAM2 already encodes rich semantic structure in its features. We propose SANSA (Semantically AligNed Segment Anything 2), a framework that makes this latent structure explicit, and repurposes SAM2 for few-shot segmentation through minimal task-specific modifications. SANSA achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot segmentation benchmarks specifically designed to assess generalization, outperforms generalist methods in the popular in-context setting, supports various prompts flexible interaction via points, boxes, or scribbles, and remains significantly faster and more compact than prior approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/ClaudiaCuttano/SANSA.
Head detection and tracking are essential for downstream tasks, but current methods often require large computational budgets, which increase latencies and ties up resources (e.g., processors, memory, and bandwidth). To address this, we propose a framework to enhance tiny head detection and tracking by optimizing the balance between performance and efficiency. Our framework integrates (1) a cross-domain detection loss, (2) a multi-scale module, and (3) a small receptive field detection mechanism. These innovations enhance detection by bridging the gap between large and small detectors, capturing high-frequency details at multiple scales during training, and using filters with small receptive fields to detect tiny heads. Evaluations on the CroHD and CrowdHuman datasets show improved Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) and mean Average Precision (mAP), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in crowded scenes.
Referring Multi-object tracking (RMOT) is an important research field in computer vision. Its task form is to guide the models to track the objects that conform to the language instruction. However, the RMOT task commonly requires clear language instructions, such methods often fail to work when complex language instructions with reasoning characteristics appear. In this work, we propose a new task, called Reasoning-based Multi-Object Tracking (ReaMOT). ReaMOT is a more challenging task that requires accurate reasoning about objects that match the language instruction with reasoning characteristic and tracking the objects' trajectories. To advance the ReaMOT task and evaluate the reasoning capabilities of tracking models, we construct ReaMOT Challenge, a reasoning-based multi-object tracking benchmark built upon 12 datasets. Specifically, it comprises 1,156 language instructions with reasoning characteristic, 423,359 image-language pairs, and 869 diverse scenes, which is divided into three levels of reasoning difficulty. In addition, we propose a set of evaluation metrics tailored for the ReaMOT task. Furthermore, we propose ReaTrack, a training-free framework for reasoning-based multi-object tracking based on large vision-language models (LVLM) and SAM2, as a baseline for the ReaMOT task. Extensive experiments on the ReaMOT Challenge benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our ReaTrack framework.
Extended object tracking methods based on random matrices, founded on Bayesian filters, have been able to achieve efficient recursive processes while jointly estimating the kinematic states and extension of the targets. Existing random matrix approaches typically assume that the evolution of state and extension follows a first-order Markov process, where the current estimate of the target depends solely on the previous moment. However, in real-world scenarios, this assumption fails because the evolution of states and extension is usually non-Markovian. In this paper, we introduce a novel extended object tracking method: a Bayesian recursive neural network assisted by deep memory. Initially, we propose an equivalent model under a non-Markovian assumption and derive the implementation of its Bayesian filtering framework. Thereafter, Gaussian approximation and moment matching are employed to derive the analytical solution for the proposed Bayesian filtering framework. Finally, based on the closed-form solution, we design an end-to-end trainable Bayesian recursive neural network for extended object tracking. Experiment results on simulated and real-world datasets show that the proposed methods outperforms traditional extended object tracking methods and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches.
The integration of image and event streams offers a promising approach for achieving robust visual object tracking in complex environments. However, current fusion methods achieve high performance at the cost of significant computational overhead and struggle to efficiently extract the sparse, asynchronous information from event streams, failing to leverage the energy-efficient advantages of event-driven spiking paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose the first fully Spiking Frame-Event Tracking framework called SpikeFET. This network achieves synergistic integration of convolutional local feature extraction and Transformer-based global modeling within the spiking paradigm, effectively fusing frame and event data. To overcome the degradation of translation invariance caused by convolutional padding, we introduce a Random Patchwork Module (RPM) that eliminates positional bias through randomized spatial reorganization and learnable type encoding while preserving residual structures. Furthermore, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Regularization (STR) strategy that overcomes similarity metric degradation from asymmetric features by enforcing spatio-temporal consistency among temporal template features in latent space. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior tracking accuracy over existing methods while significantly reducing power consumption, attaining an optimal balance between performance and efficiency. The code will be released.