# DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.24211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00850/) (2016)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [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)
- [FlowNet3D: Learning Scene Flow in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01411/) (2018)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [DepthCrafter: Generating Consistent Long Depth Sequences for Open-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02095/) (2024)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [Deep Patch Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04726/) (2022)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [St4RTrack: Simultaneous 4D Reconstruction and Tracking in the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13152/) (2025)
- [SpatialTrackerV2: 3D Point Tracking Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12462/) (2025)
- [TAPIP3D: Tracking Any Point in Persistent 3D Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14717/) (2025)
- [AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07310/) (2025)
- [Efficiently Reconstructing Dynamic Scenes One D4RT at a Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08924/) (2025)
- [Any4D: Unified Feed-Forward Metric 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10935/) (2025)
- [Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13802/) (2025)
- [4Real-Video: Learning Generalizable Photo-Realistic 4D Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04462/) (2024)
- [Generative Video Motion Editing with 3D Point Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02015/) (2025)
- [4RC: 4D Reconstruction via Conditional Querying Anytime and Anywhere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10094/) (2026)
- [AMPLIFY: Actionless Motion Priors for Robot Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14198/) (2025)
- [Multi-View 3D Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21060/) (2025)
- [Object-centric 3D Motion Field for Robot Learning from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04227/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21045/) (2025)
- [CoWTracker: Tracking by Warping instead of Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04877/) (2026)
- [Track4World: Feedforward World-centric Dense 3D Tracking of All Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02573/) (2026)
- [Can Video Diffusion Model Reconstruct 4D Geometry?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21082/) (2025)
- [DELTAv2: Accelerating Dense 3D Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01170/) (2025)
- [Towards Physical Understanding in Video Generation: A 3D Point Regularization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03639/) (2025)
- [Stereo Any Video: Temporally Consistent Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05549/) (2025)
- [Flow4R: Unifying 4D Reconstruction and Tracking with Scene Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14021/) (2026)
- [FunRec: Reconstructing Functional 3D Scenes from Egocentric Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05621/) (2026)
- [TrackingWorld: World-centric Monocular 3D Tracking of Almost All Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08358/) (2025)
- [SeeU: Seeing the Unseen World via 4D Dynamics-aware Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03350/) (2025)
- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)
- [MegaFlow: Zero-Shot Large Displacement Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25739/) (2026)
- [TrackCraft3R: Repurposing Video Diffusion Transformers for Dense 3D Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12587/) (2026)
- [SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22534/) (2026)
- [TrajVG: 3D Trajectory-Coupled Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04439/) (2026)
- [OmniX: Any-view and Any-time 4D Reconstruction via Feed-forward Trajectory Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10840/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tracking dense 3D motion from monocular videos remains challenging, particularly when aiming for pixel-level precision over long sequences. We introduce DELTA, a novel method that efficiently tracks every pixel in 3D space, enabling accurate motion estimation across entire videos. Our approach leverages a joint global-local attention mechanism for reduced-resolution tracking, followed by a transformer-based upsampler to achieve high-resolution predictions. Unlike existing methods, which are limited by computational inefficiency or sparse tracking, DELTA delivers dense 3D tracking at scale, running over 8x faster than previous methods while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. Furthermore, we explore the impact of depth representation on tracking performance and identify log-depth as the optimal choice. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DELTA on multiple benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results in both 2D and 3D dense tracking tasks. Our method provides a robust solution for applications requiring fine-grained, long-term motion tracking in 3D space.