Identifying individual dogs from barks in real-world videos remains challenging and largely unexplored. Solving this problem would enable long-term behavioral analysis, veterinary monitoring, and animal welfare monitoring by attributing vocalizations and behaviors to the correct individual. Real-world videos are challenging because multiple dogs may bark simultaneously, become occluded, or move in and out of view. Prior studies show that canine vocalizations and visual appearance contain discriminative identity information, but these modalities have largely been studied independently. We present a multimodal dog-fingerprinting framework combining visual identification, multiple-object tracking, and canine vocal fingerprinting to associate bark events with individual dogs while maintaining persistent profiles. The framework synchronizes bark events with tracked dogs and updates profiles using visual appearance and vocal characteristics, enabling identification despite occlusion, overlapping vocalizations, and off-screen barking. We also introduce a benchmark of 46 real-world videos containing 213 manually annotated bark events. Our framework correctly localizes the active visible dog in 61.83% of visible events at IoU $\geq 0.30$ and achieves a 91.33% F1 score for visible versus off-screen barking detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21011
Learning dexterous manipulation benefits from human demonstration datasets that capture diverse and natural hand-object interactions. In particular, contact points and forces provide supervision on where and how strongly to interact, which cannot be fully captured by motion trajectories alone. However, methods for jointly capturing hand and object motion, contact points, and forces remain limited. Moreover, severe occlusion from hand-object interaction challenges accurate tracking of both hands and objects. To address these limitations, we present a Visual-Inertial-CONtact based hand-object tracking (VICON) framework. It holistically captures both hand and object motion along with contact information during manipulation, even under severe occlusion. First, we adopt a visual-inertial glove and an RGB-D camera for accurate hand tracking, and redesign the glove to incorporate contact sensing. Specifically, force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) are placed on the glove based on human grasp frequency to synchronously record contact states and calibrated normal forces. Second, without requiring pre-existing CAD models, we estimate object poses using RGB-D images and a mesh reconstructed from a monocular video. We propose factor-graph-based object trajectory estimation that fuses object-pose estimates weighted by visibility under hand-object occlusion, FSR measurements, and a hand-motion prior. Across 40 motion-capture sessions with five objects, VICON achieves a 2.5% failed-frame rate compared with 50.9-64.6% for the baselines, with median errors of 3.9 mm and 3.0 degrees under occlusion. Using VICON, we construct a dataset containing synchronized hand-object motion, contact points, and normal forces, and will publicly release an expanded dataset covering 10 object categories at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05180
Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) is a foundation model for image and video segmentation that sets the state of the art in visual object tracking. Its tracker, inherited from SAM 2, stores information from past frames in a memory bank, managed by a simple First-In-First-Out rule, allowing temporal consistency in complex videos. Several recent methods improve SAM 2 with hand-crafted memory update rules, each targeting a specific failure mode, such as distractors, occlusions, or object motion. However, their gains transfer only partially to the stronger SAM 3 backbone. We instead present a more general, data-driven approach that frames memory control as a sequential decision-making task. SAM3RL is an extension of the SAM 3 tracker with a lightweight memory controller, trained by reinforcement learning, that decides which frames enter the memory bank in order to maximize tracking performance. SAM3RL sets a new state of the art on 10 of 12 tracking and video object segmentation benchmarks, outperforming all hand-crafted rules without any runtime overhead. The same approach applied to SAM 2 gives SAM2RL, which outperforms hand-crafted rules on 9 of the 12 benchmarks, showing the generality of our method across model generations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19931
Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a central challenge in robotics. Learning from human hand-object interaction (HOI) datasets offers a promising pathway to diverse dexterous skills, yet existing physics-based approaches train specialist policies for individual trajectories, thereby limiting skill reuse at scale. We introduce DexMimic, a generalist dexterous hand-object tracking policy jointly trained across diverse HOI trajectories. Efficient joint training requires allocating each rollout to both an undertrained phase and a starting state that supports continued tracking. DexMimic realizes this insight through Value-Guided Reset Allocation, which adapts the initialization distribution online to prioritize difficult phases and select reset states with higher expected tracking returns. We further introduce a benchmark spanning training, fine-tuning, and generalization. Experiments show improved tracking success and training efficiency, faster fine-tuning, and the potential for zero-shot generalization to unseen trajectories and objects; larger training sets further improve efficiency and generalization. Finally, we validate DexMimic on a real-world dexterous manipulation platform.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19089
Person re-identification is typically addressed by learning identity-discriminative embeddings from individual person crops. However, player re-identification in broadcast sports videos presents a unique challenge: players from the same team often share similar appearances, while video sequences provide repeated observations of the same players under different viewpoints and surrounding contexts. Existing crop-based approaches largely ignore this contextual information, which can be critical for resolving visually similar identities. Here, we propose ContextReID, a contextualized embedding framework that represents a player by jointly considering other players in the same frame and observations from different frames of the broadcast sequence. By incorporating both co-occurring players and cross-frame observations, the model learns identity features relative to the surrounding visual context rather than relying only on isolated appearance cues. We implement this framework with a vision-language model that takes sets of player crops as input and generates context-aware embeddings for individual players. A combined contextual learning and retrieval objective encourages the model to capture cross-frame identity relationships while maintaining discriminative embeddings for player matching. Experiments across three multi-object tracking benchmarks show that ContextReID improves player retrieval over conventional single-crop embedding approaches in both Rank-1 and mAP. These results highlight the utility of spatial and temporal context for reliable player identification in broadcast sports videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13259
RGB-X tracking leverages complementary modalities, such as thermal infrared, event, or depth, to improve robustness under challenging conditions. Existing general-purpose RGB-X trackers typically follow two paradigms: independent task-specific training and joint training across modality combinations. However, the former suffers from knowledge isolation and model redundancy, while the latter introduces optimization interference across heterogeneous tasks. In this work, we present UniMergeTrack, a new model merging paradigm that preserves task-specific optimization while enabling effective cross-task knowledge integration. UniMergeTrack first trains modality-specific trackers independently and then performs hierarchical model merging. Specifically, transferable backbones are merged across RGB-X tasks via high-pass-filtered merging, and complemented by lightweight task-specific experts that preserve modality-specific cues. Tracking heads are merged within each task using optimal transport-guided channel alignment to mitigate hidden channel mismatch. A subsequent distribution alignment fine-tuning stage further improves compatibility between the unified backbone and task-specific heads. Extensive experiments on the LasHeR, RGBT234, VisEvent, VOT-RGBD22, COESOT, and CDTB benchmarks demonstrate that UniMergeTrack achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, and RGB-Depth tracking tasks, while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen datasets. The source code will be released upon acceptance. The source code of this paper will be released on this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13053
End-to-end multi-object trackers have narrowed the gap with classical tracking-by-detection on association-difficult benchmarks. Yet they still make spatially implausible errors no classical tracker would, such as assigning one identity to objects on opposite sides of the frame. A model could learn to avoid them, but tracking annotations are scarce, so we encode spatial priors explicitly instead, while keeping inference fully end-to-end with no post-hoc association. We propose three spatial priors, at the data, loss, and representation stages. Spatial ID Switches bias trajectory permutations toward spatially overlapping objects, reducing the mismatch between training and inference confusions. Spatial ID Loss scales each identity's penalty by its box distance, so a distant switch costs more than a nearby one. Spatial Anchor gives each track token its frame position, an explicit spatial cue for attention. We instantiate the three priors in MOTIP2, a tracker adapted from MOTIP and built on the real-time DEIM detection transformer. Trained without extra data, its main model, MOTIP2-L, sets a new state of the art: 73.4 HOTA on DanceTrack, 76.0 on SportsMOT, and 71.1 IDF1 on PersonPath22. MOTIP2 is a family of models spanning the speed-accuracy trade-off: a lighter model, MOTIP2-S, matches the original MOTIP at over 3x the speed, and MOTIP2-X reaches 74.8 HOTA on DanceTrack.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10391
The growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased the importance of image-based UAV detection. Learning-based detectors are trained on imagery and annotations, with annotation type determining the information available during training. We focus on learning localization from frame-level target presence/absence labels when sensor or scene changes make spatial annotations for additional training burdensome. We analyze the detection capability, learning behavior, and potential applications of an existing architecture for point detection of small UAVs, trained with presence/absence labels and requiring no external detector. The architecture freezes spatial features learned through classification and trains a readout with the same frame labels to produce spatial score maps and point detections. On two thermal infrared datasets, CST Anti-UAV and Anti-UAV410, we evaluate localization hit rates and detection rates under false-alarm constraints, analyze the effects of training stages, label allocation, synthesis, and model configuration, and compare with bounding-box detectors. We also explore potential applications on Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) using its visible-light imagery and frame labels. Classification training strengthened target-related spatial responses, while readout training helped extract them consistently. Distributing similar label counts across more videos yielded higher localization hit rates, while synthesis effects varied by dataset and evaluation criterion. Higher localization hit rates did not always improve detection under false-alarm constraints, and failures remained when target signals were weak relative to background variation and under cross-dataset transfer. These findings provide guidance on label allocation, spatial representations and readouts, synthesis, and false-alarm control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07705
Cooperative 3D tracking must integrate complementary observations across agents and time while maintaining consistent identities. When evidence integration and identity inheritance share a matching decision, errors arising from cross-view appearance differences and spatial misalignment can compromise both feature fusion and track continuity. We propose FFBL-Coop, a fuse first, bind later framework that separates instance admission from identity management. Confidence-ranked Slot Admission (CSA) allocates cooperative queries to available ego slots using confidence and spatial proximity. Unified Representation Aggregation (URA) uses cooperative semantic features and aligned anchors to guide ego-feature retrieval, refining the augmented query bank within a shared transformer decoder. After refinement, Cooperative-Priority Identity Anchoring (CPIA) combines learned association with persistent mappings to establish accepted identity assignments across frames. A shared codebook reduces transmitted payload while retaining AP and AMOTA close to the uncompressed variant. FFBL-Coop achieves AMOTA/AP of 0.611/0.548 on V2X-Seq and 0.688/0.653 on Griffin-25M. Code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01750
Memory-attention-based Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have demonstrated strong zero-shot tracking capability, yet their substantial memory requirements confine them to short video clips and their single-prompt inference design makes multi-category open-vocabulary tracking computationally prohibitive. This work introduces two contributions toward fully automated tracking annotation of arbitrary video. The Generalized Presence Token (GPT) reformulates SAM3's inference pipeline to process N text prompts simultaneously via virtual prompt batching, reducing image encoding cost from O(N) to O(1) with no modifications to any learned component. The Annotation and Segmentation Handler (ASH) extends any memory-attention VIS tracker to sequences of arbitrary length through overlapping temporal chunks with IoU-based inter-chunk identity matching, requiring no dataset-specific training. Instantiated on SAM3, the resulting pipeline -- SAM3-ASH -- achieves state-of-the-art HOTA on MOTS20 under fully zero-shot conditions and remains competitive with trained specialists across seven additional benchmarks, while peak GPU memory consumption stays below 25 GB, establishing a practical baseline for scalable, training-free automated video annotation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01022
Many visual tracking methods use rejection mechanisms to suppress unreliable predictions. However, these mechanisms can also reject correctly localized candidates, leaving useful information unused. We investigate how to identify and recover these candidates while preserving native accepted outputs and candidate coordinates. To this end, we propose P-SRM (Post-rejection Selective Recovery Method), which combines spatial responses, past accepted states, and native decision margins to reassess candidates and selectively restore reliable predictions. We evaluate P-SRM on six trackers and four datasets spanning category-specific, point, and generic object tracking. Across all nine configurations, P-SRM improves rejected-candidate ranking and overall tracking performance. These results show that post-rejection verification can identify and recover useful predictions discarded by native rejection, demonstrating the value of reusing rejected information. Project repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39832
Visual object tracking typically assumes that the initial template and subsequent search frames share the same sensing modality. In practice, sensor availability or operation may change over time, creating a substantial representation gap between template and search frames. Unlike conventional multi-modal tracking where paired modalities are simultaneously available, cross-modal tracking requires localization when template and search frames originate from different active modalities. Accordingly, we introduce TSDA-Track, a Template-Search Domain Adaptation framework to reduce modality discrepancy during training. We investigate two feature alignment strategies. Pre-AFA TSDA-Track applies adversarial alignment before transformer's template-search interaction to suppress modality-specific bias. Enc-CFA TSDA-Track applies contrastive alignment to encoder representations after interaction to strengthen target-level cross-modal correspondence. Both variants retain a shared inference pipeline without modality-specific branches. Experiments on LasHeR, and zero-shot evaluations on RGBT234 and GTOT under multiple cross-modal protocols demonstrate improvements over representative state-of-the-art trackers. For instance, under the modality-switch protocol on RGBT234, Pre-AFA TSDA-Track achieves an SR/PR of 43.2/56.0, compared with 36.8/50.0 for ToMP-101 baseline. In addition, a study on Anti-UAV-024 further verifies the applicability of TSDA-Track to aerial tracking. Our study highlights the effectiveness of feature alignment domain adaptation for cross-modal tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38637
Quantifying collective fish behavior requires accurate trajectories, yet multi-view 3D tracking remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, visually similar individuals, and the long-standing scarcity of identity annotations. We present TrackFish3D, a geometry-driven self-supervised framework for dense multi-camera 3D tracking of schooling fish. Instead of relying on appearance-based re-identification or manually annotated identities, TrackFish3D turns calibrated multi-view geometry into supervision: triangulation and reprojection consistency provide pseudo-associations, while a geometric encoder and global association transformer learn all-to-all cross-view correspondence within each frame. To make these associations identity-aware, TrackFish3D introduces a self-supervised contrastive objective that separates co-visible individuals in the embedding space, together with a temporal predictor that preserves identities and bridges short occlusions across frames. The resulting model is trained once on unlabeled footage and applied directly to unseen test videos, requiring no cross-view identity labels, temporal annotations, 3D ground truth, appearance features, or test-time optimization. On our benchmark, TrackFish3D improves 3D Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy from 87.7% for the strongest baseline to 95.8%. On the 3D-ZeF zebrafish benchmark, it achieves 81.1% MOTA, compared with 77.4% for the best geometric baseline. TrackFish3D also generalizes beyond fish, achieving strong results on real-world bird tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38347
The ByteTrack algorithm is a widely used and computationally efficient multi-object tracking architecture. Its core innovation lies in the combination of lenient bounding box associations with tracklet similarity matching to robustly deal with object occlusions. However, this strategy is nevertheless vulnerable to erroneous track reclassification and identity switching, as detection confidence scores dictate association priority. To address this, I present a simple enhancement of the ByteTrack architecture, named ByteTraX, that optimises track continuity via a single unified matching threshold, while penalising identity switches through stringent track initiation criteria. This approach achieves consistently improved performance across a range of diverse benchmarks including GMOT-40, LC-MOT, SportsMOT, TeamTrack, DAMUNT, and DeepSea-MOT, while simultaneously increasing processing speed by >10%. Specifically, results demonstrate a >40% reduction in identity switches, accompanied by mean increases in HOTA of 3.6, IDF1 of 5.6, and FPS of 6.3. As such, adoption of the ByteTraX algorithm has the potential to substantially enhance tracking performance over the ByteTrack baseline, while retaining the efficiency needed for real-time deployment. To facilitate usage, I provide the source code, integration functionality for the YOLO family of object detection models, and deployment instructions via an open source repository.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37801
General multi-object tracking (GMOT) tracks all instances of a user-specified category from a single first-frame exemplar. Prior work relies on bounding boxes and surrogate training, and struggles with non-rigid objects, crowded scenes, and distractors. We introduce UGO, a unified GMOT tracker that pairs a pretrained exemplar-conditioned detection head with an instance-propagation head in a common architecture. A novel training-free, energy-minimization consolidation method converts overlapping proposals into exclusive pixel-wise masks and detections, resolving over-segmentation, duplicates, and conflicts. A hierarchical memory spanning global and instance levels improves recall and per-instance segmentation accuracy using a new memory management protocol. UGO sets a new state-of-the-art on GMOT benchmarks and video object counting, and is competitive with specialist MOT methods, establishing a strong paradigm for unified, open-category multi-object tracking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37339
RGB-T object tracking leverages the complementary characteristics of visible and thermal infrared modalities to improve robustness under adverse conditions. Existing supervised methods typically rely on costly modality-aligned bounding box annotations, while most self-supervised approaches follow a two-stage pseudo-labeling paradigm, making tracker training sensitive to pseudo-label quality and preventing joint end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose ESMTrack, a fully end-to-end self-supervised RGB-T tracking framework without offline pseudo-label generation or dense frame-level bounding box annotations. Given only the standard initial-frame annotation used in visual tracking, ESMTrack learns discriminative and temporally consistent representations through two complementary objectives: a grounding triplet loss on annotated initial frames and a cross-frame temporal triplet loss on unlabeled search frames, with reliable samples selected by forward-backward consistency. To address modality dominance bias, ESMTrack employs a three-branch architecture consisting of a fusion branch and two unimodal branches for RGB and thermal inputs. We quantify modality contributions using the Average Peak-to-Correlation Energy by measuring response discrepancies between the fusion and unimodal branches. The resulting reliability estimates guide a training-time modality decoupling mechanism that suppresses dominant-modality shortcuts and adaptively weights cross-modal contrastive learning for task-level alignment. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that ESMTrack achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance, strong cross-dataset generalization, and real-time inference speed. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37162
With the advent of snapshot cameras, hyperspectral video is becoming more readily available. In recent years, new applications have emerged which have led to increasingly larger datasets. However, hyperspectral video compression remains in the early stages. In this study, we explore the use of implicit neural representation as a candidate solution. We propose a novel extension of an existing RGB video compression model, achieving Bjøntegaard Delta PSNR gains of +4.99 dB and Bjøntegaard Delta rate of -88.88% compared to traditional hyperspectral image compression methods applied frame-by-frame. In addition to reconstruction quality, the effects on downstream task performance are measured in the form of object tracking success. Compared to video compressed with methods based on principal component analysis and JPEG2000 in low data regimes, our proposed method improves tracking area under the curve by up to 23.42% and distance precision by up to 35.56% on examples from the HOT2026 dataset.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31435
Segmentation-based multi-object tracking (MOT) with foundation video models such as SAM2 offers strong localization quality, yet remains fragile in crowded, real-world scenes. In detector-prompted SAM2 pipelines, failures typically arise at three stages of the object lifecycle: (i) erroneous or duplicate track initiation, (ii) memory drift during close interactions, and (iii) unreliable re-identification after long occlusions or re-entry. These errors corrupt object memory and accumulate over time, making long-horizon tracking unstable. In this paper, we reframe MOT as a lifecycle memory integrity problem. We present LiAM-SAM, a Lifecycle-Aware Memory (LiAM) framework with targeted mechanisms for each of the three failure modes. At track birth, to prevent faulty or duplicate initiations, we apply contrastive track initiation, which conditions each prompt on existing nearby tracked instances. To preserve memory integrity during strong interactions, we introduce motion- and geometry-grounded memory correction that resolves interaction confusions and suppresses drift. For reliable re-identification after disappearance, we maintain an adaptive context memory that promotes diverse and trustworthy references as long-term identity anchors. Finally, similarity aware spatial pruning optionally selects the memory tokens to retain at cross-attention time, improving efficiency with minimal accuracy loss. LiAM-SAM represents a modular, detector-agnostic, SAM2-based MOT system that achieves state-of-the-art HOTA and IDF1 on the evaluated benchmarks. In association-challenging environments, our ablations show that LiAM improves a detector+SAM2 baseline by +10.5 HOTA, +17.4 AssA, and reduces identity switches by 96%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28078
This work presents a video summarization algorithm based on multi-object tracking and person reidentification. We integrate facial embeddings, 3D body-shape features, and visual appearance into a unified tracking framework. These representations enable hierarchical identity assignment and tracking through bidirectional anchoring, which robustly recovers trajectories under severe occlusion or low visual quality. From these stable trajectories, we generate a compact set of summaries for each identity. We select keyframes using a multi-factor weighting scheme that optimizes biometric clarity, social interaction, and motion dynamics, while Adaptive Non-Maximum Suppression ensures temporal diversity. Evaluation on a custom dataset demonstrates tracking stability, achieving an IDF1 of 97.89% and a MOTA of 95.79%. Compared to Top-K selection, our algorithm also increases visual diversity by 146%, temporal coverage by 89%, and information retrievability by 3.5%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25837
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for EdgeAI perception systems, where accurate object localization and reliable identification enable safe decision-making. Singleagent MOT suffers from occlusions, sensor noise, and partial scene understanding in complex real-world scenarios. While multi-agent systems improve robustness by exploiting shared information, they introduce redundant measurements that lead to false data associations, and still struggle to capture nonlinear object dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose CDKFTrack, a Cluster-aware Data-Driven Kalman Filtering framework for Cooperative 3D MOT. The proposed method first fuses multivehicle 3D LiDAR detections through a Graph Laplacian-based formulation. Then, a cluster-aware redundancy reduction scheme groups spatially related detections and selects representative observations to reduce duplicate inputs to the tracker. The resulting detections are processed by a data-driven Kalman filter that learns object motion dynamics from data, reducing dependence on predefined linear motion assumptions. Furthermore, a wavelet-based temporal refinement module leverages the multiresolution decomposition property of wavelets to attenuate shortterm positional fluctuations and improve trajectory continuity. To the best of our knowledge, CDKF-Track is the first framework to jointly address detection-level fusion redundancy and learnable motion modeling in cooperative 3D MOT. Experimental results on the real-world V2V4Real dataset indicate that CDKF-Track achieves up to 27.99% improvements in tracking accuracy over state-of-the-art multi-agent MOT methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25668