# AnthroTAP: Learning Point Tracking with Real-World Motion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06233 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06233/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [Scene Representation Transformer: Geometry-Free Novel View Synthesis Through Set-Latent Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13152/) (2021)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02468/) (2017)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04319/) (2024)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)
- [MV-TAP: Tracking Any Point in Multi-View Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02006/) (2025)
- [TETO: Tracking Events with Teacher Observation for Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23487/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point tracking models often struggle to generalize to real-world videos because large-scale training data is predominantly syntheticunicodex2014the only source currently feasible to produce at scale. Collecting real-world annotations, however, is prohibitively expensive, as it requires tracking hundreds of points across frames. We introduce AnthroTAP, an automated pipeline that generates large-scale pseudo-labeled point tracking data from real human motion videos. Leveraging the structured complexity of human movementunicodex2014non-rigid deformations, articulated motion, and frequent occlusionsunicodex2014AnthroTAP fits Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) models to detected humans, projects mesh vertices onto image planes, resolves occlusions via ray-casting, and filters unreliable tracks using optical flow consistency. A model trained on the AnthroTAP dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance on TAP-Vid, a challenging general-domain benchmark for tracking any point on diverse rigid and non-rigid objects (e.g., humans, animals, robots, and vehicles). Our approach outperforms recent self-training methods trained on vastly larger real datasets, while requiring only one day of training on 4 GPUs. AnthroTAP shows that structured human motion offers a scalable and effective source of real-world supervision for point tracking.