Offline 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical component of the 4D auto-labeling (4DAL) process. It enhances pseudo-labels generated by high-performance detectors through the incorporation of temporal context. However, existing offline 3D MOT approaches are direct extensions of online frameworks and fail to fully exploit the advantages of offline setting. Moreover, these methods often depend on fixed upstream and customized architectures, limiting their adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose Offline-Poly, a general offline 3D MOT method based on a tracking-centric design. We introduce a standardized paradigm termed Tracking-by-Tracking (TBT), which operates exclusively on arbitrary off-the-shelf tracking outputs and produces offline-refined tracklets. This formulation decouples offline tracker from specific upstream detectors or trackers. Under the TBT paradigm, Offline-Poly accepts one or multiple coarse tracking results and processes them through a structured pipeline comprising pre-processing, hierarchical matching and fusion, and tracklet refinement. Each module is designed to capitalize on the two fundamental properties of offline tracking: resource uncon
Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to monitor and profile users across the web. The research community has a long track record of analyzing new web tracking techniques, designing and evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures, and assessing compliance with privacy regulations. Despite a substantial body of work on web tracking, the literature remains fragmented across distinctly scoped studies, making it difficult to identify overarching trends, connect new but related techniques, and identify research gaps in the field. Today, web tracking is undergoing a once-in-a-generation transformation, driven by fundamental shifts in the advertising industry, the adoption of anti-tracking countermeasures by browsers, and the growing enforcement of emerging privacy regulations. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) aims to consolidate and synthesize this wide-ranging research, offering a comprehensive overview of the technical mechanisms, countermeasures, and regulations that shape the
Over the past two decades, the task of musical beat tracking has transitioned from heuristic onset detection algorithms to highly capable deep neural networks (DNN). Although DNN-based beat tracking models achieve near-perfect performance on mainstream, percussive datasets, the SMC dataset has stubbornly yielded low F-measure scores. By testing how well state-of-the-art models detect beats on individual tracks in the SMC dataset, we identify three distinct failure modes: octave errors, continuity errors, and complete tracking failure where all metrics fall below 0.3. We reveal that state-of-the-art models tend to generate "confident-but-wrong" activations. Furthermore, we show that the standard DBN's default minimum tempo of 55 BPM prevents it from inferring the correct tempo for 21\% of SMC tracks, forcing double-tempo predictions on slow music. By exposing such fundamental oversights, we provide concrete directions for improving beat and downbeat detection, specifically emphasizing training data diversification and multi-hypothesis tempo estimation.
Multi-modal object tracking (MMOT) is an emerging field that combines data from various modalities, \eg vision (RGB), depth, thermal infrared, event, language and audio, to estimate the state of an arbitrary object in a video sequence. It is of great significance for many applications such as autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance. In recent years, MMOT has received more and more attention. However, existing MMOT algorithms mainly focus on two modalities (\eg RGB+depth, RGB+thermal infrared, and RGB+language). To leverage more modalities, some recent efforts have been made to learn a unified visual object tracking model for any modality. Additionally, some large-scale multi-modal tracking benchmarks have been established by simultaneously providing more than two modalities, such as vision-language-audio (\eg WebUAV-3M) and vision-depth-language (\eg UniMod1K). To track the latest progress in MMOT, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in this report. Specifically, we first divide existing MMOT tasks into five main categories, \ie RGBL tracking, RGBE tracking, RGBD tracking, RGBT tracking, and miscellaneous (RGB+X), where X can be any modality, such as language, depth, a
Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in visual object tracking, largely due to the availability of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets have primarily focused on open-air scenarios and have largely overlooked underwater animal tracking-especially the complex challenges posed by camouflaged marine animals. To bridge this gap, we take a step forward by proposing the first large-scale multi-modal underwater camouflaged object tracking dataset, namely UW-COT220. Based on the proposed dataset, this work first comprehensively evaluates current advanced visual object tracking methods, including SAM- and SAM2-based trackers, in challenging underwater environments, \eg, coral reefs. Our findings highlight the improvements of SAM2 over SAM, demonstrating its enhanced ability to handle the complexities of underwater camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework called VL-SAM2, based on the video foundation model SAM2. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across underwater and open-air object tracking datasets. The dataset and codes are available at~{\col
We introduce TAPIP3D, a novel approach for long-term 3D point tracking in monocular RGB and RGB-D videos. TAPIP3D represents videos as camera-stabilized spatio-temporal feature clouds, leveraging depth and camera motion information to lift 2D video features into a 3D world space where camera movement is effectively canceled out. Within this stabilized 3D representation, TAPIP3D iteratively refines multi-frame motion estimates, enabling robust point tracking over long time horizons. To handle the irregular structure of 3D point distributions, we propose a 3D Neighborhood-to-Neighborhood (N2N) attention mechanism - a 3D-aware contextualization strategy that builds informative, spatially coherent feature neighborhoods to support precise trajectory estimation. Our 3D-centric formulation significantly improves performance over existing 3D point tracking methods and even surpasses state-of-the-art 2D pixel trackers in accuracy when reliable depth is available. The model supports inference in both camera-centric (unstabilized) and world-centric (stabilized) coordinates, with experiments showing that compensating for camera motion leads to substantial gains in tracking robustness. By repla
Transformer has recently demonstrated great potential in improving vision-language (VL) tracking algorithms. However, most of the existing VL trackers rely on carefully designed mechanisms to perform the multi-stage multi-modal fusion. Additionally, direct multi-modal fusion without alignment ignores distribution discrepancy between modalities in feature space, potentially leading to suboptimal representations. In this work, we propose COST, a contrastive one-stage transformer fusion framework for VL tracking, aiming to learn semantically consistent and unified VL representations. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive alignment strategy that maximizes mutual information (MI) between a video and its corresponding language description. This enables effective cross-modal alignment, yielding semantically consistent features in the representation space. By leveraging a visual-linguistic transformer, we establish an efficient multi-modal fusion and reasoning mechanism, empirically demonstrating that a simple stack of transformer encoders effectively enables unified VL representations. Moreover, we contribute a newly collected VL tracking benchmark dataset for small object tracking, na
This report introduces ReID-SAM, a novel model developed for the SkiTB Challenge that addresses the complexities of tracking skier appearance. Our approach integrates the SAMURAI tracker with a person re-identification (Re-ID) module and advanced post-processing techniques to enhance accuracy in challenging skiing scenarios. We employ an OSNet-based Re-ID model to minimize identity switches and utilize YOLOv11 with Kalman filtering or STARK-based object detection for precise equipment tracking. When evaluated on the SkiTB dataset, ReID-SAM achieved a state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.870, surpassing existing methods across alpine, ski jumping, and freestyle skiing disciplines. These results demonstrate significant advancements in skier tracking accuracy and provide valuable insights for computer vision applications in winter sports.
In this paper, we introduce a new sequence-to-sequence learning framework for RGB-based and multi-modal object tracking. First, we present SeqTrack for RGB-based tracking. It casts visual tracking as a sequence generation task, forecasting object bounding boxes in an autoregressive manner. This differs from previous trackers, which depend on the design of intricate head networks, such as classification and regression heads. SeqTrack employs a basic encoder-decoder transformer architecture. The encoder utilizes a bidirectional transformer for feature extraction, while the decoder generates bounding box sequences autoregressively using a causal transformer. The loss function is a plain cross-entropy. Second, we introduce SeqTrackv2, a unified sequence-to-sequence framework for multi-modal tracking tasks. Expanding upon SeqTrack, SeqTrackv2 integrates a unified interface for auxiliary modalities and a set of task-prompt tokens to specify the task. This enables it to manage multi-modal tracking tasks using a unified model and parameter set. This sequence learning paradigm not only simplifies the tracking framework, but also showcases superior performance across 14 challenging benchmark
The development of smart cities has led to the generation of massive amounts of multi-modal data in the context of a range of tasks that enable a comprehensive monitoring of the smart city infrastructure and services. This paper surveys one of the most critical tasks, multi-modal visual object tracking (MMVOT), from the perspective of multimodality analysis. Generally, MMVOT differs from single-modal tracking in four key aspects, data collection, modality alignment and annotation, model designing, and evaluation. Accordingly, we begin with an introduction to the relevant data modalities, laying the groundwork for their integration. This naturally leads to a discussion of challenges of multi-modal data collection, alignment, and annotation. Subsequently, existing MMVOT methods are categorised, based on different ways to deal with visible (RGB) and X modalities: programming the auxiliary X branch with replicated or non-replicated experimental configurations from the RGB branch. Here X can be thermal infrared (T), depth (D), event (E), near infrared (NIR), language (L), or sonar (S). The final part of the paper addresses evaluation and benchmarking. In summary, we undertake an omni su
Underwater object tracking (UOT) is a foundational task for identifying and tracing submerged entities in underwater video sequences. However, current UOT datasets suffer from limitations in scale, diversity of target categories and scenarios covered, hindering the training and evaluation of modern tracking algorithms. To bridge this gap, we take the first step and introduce WebUOT-1M, \ie, the largest public UOT benchmark to date, sourced from complex and realistic underwater environments. It comprises 1.1 million frames across 1,500 video clips filtered from 408 target categories, largely surpassing previous UOT datasets, \eg, UVOT400. Through meticulous manual annotation and verification, we provide high-quality bounding boxes for underwater targets. Additionally, WebUOT-1M includes language prompts for video sequences, expanding its application areas, \eg, underwater vision-language tracking. Most existing trackers are tailored for open-air environments, leading to performance degradation when applied to UOT due to domain gaps. Retraining and fine-tuning these trackers are challenging due to sample imbalances and limited real-world underwater datasets. To tackle these challenge
The unique complementarity of frame-based and event cameras for high frame rate object tracking has recently inspired some research attempts to develop multi-modal fusion approaches. However, these methods directly fuse both modalities and thus ignore the environmental attributes, e.g., motion blur, illumination variance, occlusion, scale variation, etc. Meanwhile, insufficient interaction between search and template features makes distinguishing target objects and backgrounds difficult. As a result, performance degradation is induced especially in challenging conditions. This paper proposes a novel and effective Transformer-based event-guided tracking framework, called eMoE-Tracker, which achieves new SOTA performance under various conditions. Our key idea is to disentangle the environment into several learnable attributes to dynamically learn the attribute-specific features and strengthen the target information by improving the interaction between the target template and search regions. To achieve the goal, we first propose an environmental Mix-of-Experts (eMoE) module that is built upon the environmental Attributes Disentanglement to learn attribute-specific features and environ
Tracking quintessence, in a spatially flat and isotropic space-time with a minimally coupled canonical scalar field and an asymptotically inverse power-law potential $V(\varphi)\propto\varphi^{-p}$, $p>0$, as $\varphi\rightarrow0$, is investigated. This is done by introducing a new three-dimensional \emph{regular} dynamical system, which enables a rigorous explanation of the tracking feature: 1) The dynamical system has a tracker fixed point $\mathrm{T}$ with a two-dimensional stable manifold that pushes an open set of nearby solutions toward a single tracker solution originating from $\mathrm{T}$. 2) All solutions, including the tracker solution and the solutions that track/shadow it, end at a common future attractor fixed point that depends on the potential. Thus, the open set of solutions that shadow the tracker solution share its properties during the tracking quintessence epoch. We also discuss similarities and differences of underlying mechanisms for tracking, thawing and scaling freezing quintessence, and, moreover, we illustrate with state space pictures that all of these types of quintessence exist simultaneously for certain potentials.
3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) captures stable and comprehensive motion states of surrounding obstacles, essential for robotic perception. However, current 3D trackers face issues with accuracy and latency consistency. In this paper, we propose Fast-Poly, a fast and effective filter-based method for 3D MOT. Building upon our previous work Poly-MOT, Fast-Poly addresses object rotational anisotropy in 3D space, enhances local computation densification, and leverages parallelization technique, improving inference speed and precision. Fast-Poly is extensively tested on two large-scale tracking benchmarks with Python implementation. On the nuScenes dataset, Fast-Poly achieves new state-of-the-art performance with 75.8% AMOTA among all methods and can run at 34.2 FPS on a personal CPU. On the Waymo dataset, Fast-Poly exhibits competitive accuracy with 63.6% MOTA and impressive inference speed (35.5 FPS). The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/lixiaoyu2000/FastPoly.
Tool tracking in surgical videos is essential for advancing computer-assisted interventions, such as skill assessment, safety zone estimation, and human-machine collaboration. However, the lack of context-rich datasets limits AI applications in this field. Existing datasets rely on overly generic tracking formalizations that fail to capture surgical-specific dynamics, such as tools moving out of the camera's view or exiting the body. This results in less clinically relevant trajectories and a lack of flexibility for real-world surgical applications. Methods trained on these datasets often struggle with visual challenges such as smoke, reflection, and bleeding, further exposing the limitations of current approaches. We introduce CholecTrack20, a specialized dataset for multi-class, multi-tool tracking in surgical procedures. It redefines tracking formalization with three perspectives: (i) intraoperative, (ii) intracorporeal, and (iii) visibility, enabling adaptable and clinically meaningful tool trajectories. The dataset comprises 20 full-length surgical videos, annotated at 1 fps, yielding over 35K frames and 65K labeled tool instances. Annotations include spatial location, categor
Event-based eye tracking has shown great promise with the high temporal resolution and low redundancy provided by the event camera. However, the diversity and abruptness of eye movement patterns, including blinking, fixating, saccades, and smooth pursuit, pose significant challenges for eye localization. To achieve a stable event-based eye-tracking system, this paper proposes a bidirectional long-term sequence modeling and time-varying state selection mechanism to fully utilize contextual temporal information in response to the variability of eye movements. Specifically, the MambaPupil network is proposed, which consists of the multi-layer convolutional encoder to extract features from the event representations, a bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and a Linear Time-Varying State Space Module (LTV-SSM), to selectively capture contextual correlation from the forward and backward temporal relationship. Furthermore, the Bina-rep is utilized as a compact event representation, and the tailor-made data augmentation, called as Event-Cutout, is proposed to enhance the model's robustness by applying spatial random masking to the event image. The evaluation on the ThreeET-plus benchma
Accurate and robust visual object tracking is one of the most challenging and fundamental computer vision problems. It entails estimating the trajectory of the target in an image sequence, given only its initial location, and segmentation, or its rough approximation in the form of a bounding box. Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCFs) and deep Siamese Networks (SNs) have emerged as dominating tracking paradigms, which have led to significant progress. Following the rapid evolution of visual object tracking in the last decade, this survey presents a systematic and thorough review of more than 90 DCFs and Siamese trackers, based on results in nine tracking benchmarks. First, we present the background theory of both the DCF and Siamese tracking core formulations. Then, we distinguish and comprehensively review the shared as well as specific open research challenges in both these tracking paradigms. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze the performance of DCF and Siamese trackers on nine benchmarks, covering different experimental aspects of visual tracking: datasets, evaluation metrics, performance, and speed comparisons. We finish the survey by presenting recommendations and suggesti
3D Multi-object tracking (MOT) ensures consistency during continuous dynamic detection, conducive to subsequent motion planning and navigation tasks in autonomous driving. However, camera-based methods suffer in the case of occlusions and it can be challenging to accurately track the irregular motion of objects for LiDAR-based methods. Some fusion methods work well but do not consider the untrustworthy issue of appearance features under occlusion. At the same time, the false detection problem also significantly affects tracking. As such, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion 3D MOT framework based on the Combined Appearance-Motion Optimization (CAMO-MOT), which uses both camera and LiDAR data and significantly reduces tracking failures caused by occlusion and false detection. For occlusion problems, we are the first to propose an occlusion head to select the best object appearance features multiple times effectively, reducing the influence of occlusions. To decrease the impact of false detection in tracking, we design a motion cost matrix based on confidence scores which improve the positioning and object prediction accuracy in 3D space. As existing multi-object tracking methods o
Re-identification (ReID) in multi-object tracking (MOT) for UAVs in maritime computer vision has been challenging for several reasons. More specifically, short-term re-identification (ReID) is difficult due to the nature of the characteristics of small targets and the sudden movement of the drone's gimbal. Long-term ReID suffers from the lack of useful appearance diversity. In response to these challenges, we present an adaptable motion-based MOT algorithm, called Metadata Guided MOT (MG-MOT). This algorithm effectively merges short-term tracking data into coherent long-term tracks, harnessing crucial metadata from UAVs, including GPS position, drone altitude, and camera orientations. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of our MOT algorithm. Utilizing the challenging SeaDroneSee tracking dataset, which encompasses the aforementioned scenarios, we achieve a much-improved performance in the latest edition of the UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking Challenge with a state-of-the-art HOTA of 69.5% and an IDF1 of 85.9% on the testing split.
A single digital newsletter usually contains many messages (regions). Users' reading time spent on, and read level (skip/skim/read-in-detail) of each message is important for platforms to understand their users' interests, personalize their contents, and make recommendations. Based on accurate but expensive-to-collect eyetracker-recorded data, we built models that predict per-region reading time based on easy-to-collect Javascript browser tracking data. With eye-tracking, we collected 200k ground-truth datapoints on participants reading news on browsers. Then we trained machine learning and deep learning models to predict message-level reading time based on user interactions like mouse position, scrolling, and clicking. We reached 27\% percentage error in reading time estimation with a two-tower neural network based on user interactions only, against the eye-tracking ground truth data, while the heuristic baselines have around 46\% percentage error. We also discovered the benefits of replacing per-session models with per-timestamp models, and adding user pattern features. We concluded with suggestions on developing message-level reading estimation techniques based on available data