# Leveraging Object Priors for Point Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05786/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [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)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03604/) (2019)
- [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)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [LaMAR: Benchmarking Localization and Mapping for Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10770/) (2022)
- [RoboTAP: Tracking Arbitrary Points for Few-Shot Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15975/) (2023)
- [CRAFT: Cross-Attentional Flow Transformer for Robust Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16896/) (2022)
- [VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08340/) (2023)
- [Accurate Optical Flow via Direct Cost Volume Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07325/) (2017)
- [MFT: Long-Term Tracking of Every Pixel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12998/) (2023)
- [Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00786/) (2023)
- [Exploring Simple 3D Multi-Object Tracking for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10312/) (2021)
- [TransFlow: Transformer as Flow Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11523/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision with numerous applications in AR and robotics. A common failure mode in long-term point tracking occurs when the predicted point leaves the object it belongs to and lands on the background or another object. We identify this as the failure to correctly capture objectness properties in learning to track. To address this limitation of prior work, we propose a novel objectness regularization approach that guides points to be aware of object priors by forcing them to stay inside the the boundaries of object instances. By capturing objectness cues at training time, we avoid the need to compute object masks during testing. In addition, we leverage contextual attention to enhance the feature representation for capturing objectness at the feature level more effectively. As a result, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three point tracking benchmarks, and we further validate the effectiveness of our components via ablation studies. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RehgLab/tracking_objectness