# PlantTrack: Task-Driven Plant Keypoint Tracking with Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16829/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tracking plant features is crucial for various agricultural tasks like phenotyping, pruning, or harvesting, but the unstructured, cluttered, and deformable nature of plant environments makes it a challenging task. In this context, the recent advancements in foundational models show promise in addressing this challenge. In our work, we propose PlantTrack where we utilize DINOv2 which provides high-dimensional features, and train a keypoint heatmap predictor network to identify the locations of semantic features such as fruits and leaves which are then used as prompts for point tracking across video frames using TAPIR. We show that with as few as 20 synthetic images for training the keypoint predictor, we achieve zero-shot Sim2Real transfer, enabling effective tracking of plant features in real environments.