# ParticleSfM: Exploiting Dense Point Trajectories for Localizing Moving Cameras in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09137/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [D2-Net: A Trainable CNN for Joint Detection and Description of Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03561/) (2019)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09806/) (2018)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)
- [Neighbourhood Consensus Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10510/) (2018)
- [Learning Two-View Correspondences and Geometry Using Order-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04964/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07658/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [MegaSaM: Accurate, Fast, and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04463/) (2024)
- [Robust Dynamic Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02239/) (2023)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [MoSca: Dynamic Gaussian Fusion from Casual Videos via 4D Motion Scaffolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17421/) (2024)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [CamCo: Camera-Controllable 3D-Consistent Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02509/) (2024)
- [Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21705/) (2024)
- [VD3D: Taming Large Video Diffusion Transformers for 3D Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12781/) (2024)
- [AC3D: Analyzing and Improving 3D Camera Control in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18673/) (2024)
- [TTT3R: 3D Reconstruction as Test-Time Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26645/) (2025)
- [Training-free Camera Control for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10126/) (2024)
- [Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13791/) (2023)
- [Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18945/) (2025)
- [Easi3R: Estimating Disentangled Motion from DUSt3R Without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24391/) (2025)
- [SpatialTrackerV2: 3D Point Tracking Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12462/) (2025)
- [NeRF On-the-go: Exploiting Uncertainty for Distractor-free NeRFs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18715/) (2024)
- [STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10893/) (2025)
- [NVS-Solver: Video Diffusion Model as Zero-Shot Novel View Synthesizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15364/) (2024)
- [Align3R: Aligned Monocular Depth Estimation for Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03079/) (2024)
- [Uni3C: Unifying Precisely 3D-Enhanced Camera and Human Motion Controls for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14899/) (2025)
- [DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/) (2024)
- [DINO-Tracker: Taming DINO for Self-Supervised Point Tracking in a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14548/) (2024)
- [Image Conductor: Precision Control for Interactive Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15339/) (2024)
- [FlowMap: High-Quality Camera Poses, Intrinsics, and Depth via Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15259/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the pose of a moving camera from monocular video is a challenging problem, especially due to the presence of moving objects in dynamic environments, where the performance of existing camera pose estimation methods are susceptible to pixels that are not geometrically consistent. To tackle this challenge, we present a robust dense indirect structure-from-motion method for videos that is based on dense correspondence initialized from pairwise optical flow. Our key idea is to optimize long-range video correspondence as dense point trajectories and use it to learn robust estimation of motion segmentation. A novel neural network architecture is proposed for processing irregular point trajectory data. Camera poses are then estimated and optimized with global bundle adjustment over the portion of long-range point trajectories that are classified as static. Experiments on MPI Sintel dataset show that our system produces significantly more accurate camera trajectories compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our method is able to retain reasonable accuracy of camera poses on fully static scenes, which consistently outperforms strong state-of-the-art dense correspondence based methods with end-to-end deep learning, demonstrating the potential of dense indirect methods based on optical flow and point trajectories. As the point trajectory representation is general, we further present results and comparisons on in-the-wild monocular videos with complex motion of dynamic objects. Code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/particle-sfm.