# Long-Term 3D Point Tracking By Cost Volume Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13337/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [FlowNet3D: Learning Scene Flow in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01411/) (2018)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [COTR: Correspondence Transformer for Matching Across Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14167/) (2021)
- [FLOT: Scene Flow on Point Clouds Guided by Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11142/) (2020)
- [HPLFlowNet: Hierarchical Permutohedral Lattice FlowNet for Scene Flow Estimation on Large-scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05332/) (2019)
- [Neural Scene Flow Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01253/) (2021)
- [PV-RAFT: Point-Voxel Correlation Fields for Scene Flow Estimation of Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00987/) (2020)
- [Neural Non-Rigid Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13240/) (2020)
- [Fast Neural Scene Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09121/) (2023)
- [SeFlow: A Self-Supervised Scene Flow Method in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01702/) (2024)
- [HCRF-Flow: Scene Flow from Point Clouds with Continuous High-order CRFs and Position-aware Flow Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07751/) (2021)
- [Tracking and Mapping in Medical Computer Vision: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11475/) (2023)
- [PointConvFormer: Revenge of the Point-based Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02879/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised 3D Scene Flow Estimation Guided by Superpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02528/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of 3D Scene Flow from Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03673/) (2022)
- [DiffSF: Diffusion Models for Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05327/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Bird's Eye View Motion Prediction with Cross-Modality Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11499/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term point tracking is essential to understand non-rigid motion in the physical world better. Deep learning approaches have recently been incorporated into long-term point tracking, but most prior work predominantly functions in 2D. Although these methods benefit from the well-established backbones and matching frameworks, the motions they produce do not always make sense in the 3D physical world. In this paper, we propose the first deep learning framework for long-term point tracking in 3D that generalizes to new points and videos without requiring test-time fine-tuning. Our model contains a cost volume fusion module that effectively integrates multiple past appearances and motion information via a transformer architecture, significantly enhancing overall tracking performance. In terms of 3D tracking performance, our model significantly outperforms simple scene flow chaining and previous 2D point tracking methods, even if one uses ground truth depth and camera pose to backproject 2D point tracks in a synthetic scenario.
