# Intra-frame Object Tracking by Deblatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Motion-from-Blur: 3D Shape and Motion Estimation of Motion-blurred Objects in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14465/) (2021)
- [Shape from Blur: Recovering Textured 3D Shape and Motion of Fast Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08762/) (2021)
- [Finding Geometric Models by Clustering in the Consensus Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13875/) (2021)
- [Visualizing Skiers' Trajectories in Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02994/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking EfficientTAM on FMO datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06536/) (2025)
- [BlurBall: Joint Ball and Motion Blur Estimation for Table Tennis Ball Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18387/) (2025)
- [Monocular Visual Analysis for Electronic Line Calling of Tennis Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09255/) (2021)
- [Video-Based Reconstruction of the Trajectories Performed by Skiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09647/) (2021)
- [Retrieval Robust to Object Motion Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18025/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking SAM2-based Trackers on FMOX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09633/) (2025)
- [Recovering 3D Shapes from Ultra-Fast Motion-Blurred Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Objects moving at high speed along complex trajectories often appear in videos, especially videos of sports. Such objects elapse non-negligible distance during exposure time of a single frame and therefore their position in the frame is not well defined. They appear as semi-transparent streaks due to the motion blur and cannot be reliably tracked by standard trackers. We propose a novel approach called Tracking by Deblatting based on the observation that motion blur is directly related to the intra-frame trajectory of an object. Blur is estimated by solving two intertwined inverse problems, blind deblurring and image matting, which we call deblatting. The trajectory is then estimated by fitting a piecewise quadratic curve, which models physically justifiable trajectories. As a result, tracked objects are precisely localized with higher temporal resolution than by conventional trackers. The proposed TbD tracker was evaluated on a newly created dataset of videos with ground truth obtained by a high-speed camera using a novel Trajectory-IoU metric that generalizes the traditional Intersection over Union and measures the accuracy of the intra-frame trajectory. The proposed method outperforms baseline both in recall and trajectory accuracy.