# Physics-Guided Fusion for Robust 3D Tracking of Fast Moving Small Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20126/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [Deep OC-SORT: Multi-Pedestrian Tracking by Adaptive Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11813/) (2023)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [Augmentation for small object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07296/) (2019)
- [Scale Match for Tiny Person Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10664/) (2019)
- [What is YOLOv8: An In-Depth Exploration of the Internal Features of the Next-Generation Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15857/) (2024)
- [What is YOLOv5: A deep look into the internal features of the popular object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20892/) (2024)
- [TrackNet: A Deep Learning Network for Tracking High-speed and Tiny Objects in Sports Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03698/) (2019)
- [YOLO-Z: Improving small object detection in YOLOv5 for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11798/) (2021)
- [COMET: Context-Aware IoU-Guided Network for Small Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02597/) (2020)
- [An Analysis of Kalman Filter based Object Tracking Methods for Fast-Moving Tiny Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18451/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While computer vision has advanced considerably for general object detection and tracking, the specific problem of fast-moving tiny objects remains underexplored. This paper addresses the significant challenge of detecting and tracking rapidly moving small objects using an RGB-D camera. Our novel system combines deep learning-based detection with physics-based tracking to overcome the limitations of existing approaches. Our contributions include: (1) a comprehensive system design for object detection and tracking of fast-moving small objects in 3D space, (2) an innovative physics-based tracking algorithm that integrates kinematics motion equations to handle outliers and missed detections, and (3) an outlier detection and correction module that significantly improves tracking performance in challenging scenarios such as occlusions and rapid direction changes. We evaluated our proposed system on a custom racquetball dataset. Our evaluation shows our system surpassing kalman filter based trackers with up to 70% less Average Displacement Error. Our system has significant applications for improving robot perception on autonomous platforms and demonstrates the effectiveness of combining physics-based models with deep learning approaches for real-time 3D detection and tracking of challenging small objects.