CylindTrack: Depth-Aware Cylindrical Motion Modeling for Panoramic Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for embodied perception, where panoramic cameras provide a 360deg field of view to reduce blind spots and keep surrounding targets observable for longer durations. However, panoramic MOT requires motion estimates and association cues consistent with its imaging geometry. In videos represented in equirectangular projection (ERP), horizontal coordinates wrap at the image seam, while frame-wise relative-depth estimates may fluctuate over time. These inconsistencies can disrupt trajectory prediction and identity association. To address these challenges, we propose CylindTrack, a depth-aware cylindrical tracking-by-detection framework that integrates continuous angular motion modeling with temporally filtered relative-depth cues. Specifically, Depth-Temporal Trajectory Modeling (DTM) promotes instance depth from an isolated frame-wise cue into temporally filtered trajectory-level states. Spherical Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning (SSTC) combines a Temporal Mixer and Spherical Geometry-aware Attention to enhance temporal coherence and panoramic geometric alignment in depth-aware representations. Furthermore, a Topology-Aware Cylindrical Motion Model (TCMM) lifts horizontal motion into a continuous angular state space, enabling seam-consistent motion prediction and association. By jointly modeling trajectory-level depth consistency and panoramic topology, CylindTrack improves identity preservation and trajectory continuity in challenging panoramic scenes. Experiments on QuadTrack and JRDB demonstrate improvements in identity-oriented metrics with practical efficiency, achieving HOTA scores of 33.67 and 31.12, IDF1 scores of 40.45 and 34.33, and tracking speeds of 28.56 and 21.34 FPS, respectively. The source code will be released at https://github.com/warriordby/CylindTrack.