# You Are Your Best Teacher: Semi-Supervised Surgical Point Tracking with Cycle-Consistent Self-Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05722 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05722/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Distillation for medical imaging, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 16 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for medical imaging](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-medical-imaging/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03012/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [BootsTAP: Bootstrapped Training for Tracking-Any-Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00847/) (2024)
- [Local All-Pair Correspondence for Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15420/) (2024)
- [Tracking and Mapping in Medical Computer Vision: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11475/) (2023)
- [Track-On: Transformer-based Online Point Tracking with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18487/) (2025)
- [SENDD: Sparse Efficient Neural Depth and Deformation for Tissue Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06477/) (2023)
- [Refining Pre-Trained Motion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00850/) (2024)
- [Tracking Everything in Robotic-Assisted Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19821/) (2024)
- [Patient-Specific Domain Adaptation for Fast Optical Flow Based on Teacher-Student Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04928/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic datasets have enabled significant progress in point tracking by providing large-scale, densely annotated supervision. However, deploying these models in real-world domains remains challenging due to domain shift and lack of labeled data-issues that are especially severe in surgical videos, where scenes exhibit complex tissue deformation, occlusion, and lighting variation. While recent approaches adapt synthetic-trained trackers to natural videos using teacher ensembles or augmentation-heavy pseudo-labeling pipelines, their effectiveness in high-shift domains like surgery remains unexplored. This work presents SurgTracker, a semi-supervised framework for adapting synthetic-trained point trackers to surgical video using filtered self-distillation. Pseudo-labels are generated online by a fixed teacher-identical in architecture and initialization to the student-and are filtered using a cycle consistency constraint to discard temporally inconsistent trajectories. This simple yet effective design enforces geometric consistency and provides stable supervision throughout training, without the computational overhead of maintaining multiple teachers. Experiments on the STIR benchmark show that SurgTracker improves tracking performance using only 80 unlabeled videos, demonstrating its potential for robust adaptation in high-shift, data-scarce domains.