Yueyang Cang, Xiaoteng Zhang, Zhiyuan Ning +2cs.CV cs.AI
Visual object tracking requires effective temporal integration, yet most Transformer trackers still rely on predominantly feed-forward feature extraction. Existing temporal mechanisms typically update templates, prompts, queries, or prediction states, while intermediate representations are rarely reused to modulate corresponding processing stages. We propose \textbf{FeedbackTrack}, a visual-cortex-inspired framework that introduces sparse, group-level layer-aligned cross-frame feedback into pretrained Transformer trackers. Previous-frame intermediate states are detached, cached, and returned to corresponding Transformer groups in the current frame through two lightweight pathways: Query Feedback for token-level query modulation and Gate Feedback for context-dependent feature modulation. FeedbackTrack preserves the original tracking pipeline with only a fixed-size one-frame cache. Across SPMTrack and ARTrackV2, FeedbackTrack consistently improves five backbone configurations on LaSOT and GOT-10k, achieving 83.4 AO and 79.1 AUC with SPMTrack-G while adding less than 1\% parameters. Controlled comparisons show that cross-frame feedback outperforms same-frame modulation by 1.8--3.2 AO points, demonstrating that the gains mainly come from recurrent historical information. Further analysis reveals a non-uniform depth-dependent organization of learned feedback strengths, highlighting the effectiveness of recurrent feedback for Transformer tracking.
Existing RGBT trackers typically employ fusion functions with fixed parameters across different targets and scenarios. Although dynamic-architecture methods improve fusion flexibility by selecting among predefined operations, they still cannot adapt the fusion parameters to the evolving target state. To address these issues, we propose a Parameter-Dynamic Adaptive Fusion and Calibration Network (PAFCNet) for RGBT tracking. PAFCNet dynamically generates target-conditioned parameters for multimodal fusion and temporal calibration, enabling the tracking process to adapt to target appearance variations and modality quality fluctuations. Specifically, we introduce a Target-Adaptive Hypernetwork (TA-HyperNet) that leverages template representations, which preserve stable target identity and recent appearance changes with less background interference, to generate target-conditioned parameters for subsequent fusion and calibration. Based on TA-HyperNet, we design a target-aware parameter-dynamic fusion module that uses the generated parameters to modulate the fusion process. This enables the fusion module to adapt to changes in target appearance and complex scene conditions. Furthermore, since spatio-temporal information propagation may accumulate tracking noise, we propose a dynamic spatio-temporal calibration module that employs TA-HyperNet to generate calibration parameters for spatio-temporal tokens. By dynamically calibrating historical information before propagation, the module improves the reliability of temporal representations. Experimental results demonstrate that PAFCNet achieves competitive performance on multiple RGBT tracking benchmarks.
Domain adaptive visual object tracking under adverse weather conditions has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite the impressive performance, existing methods heavily rely on the large-scale video frames from both source and target domains, which is impractical under rigid resource constraints where source data is unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose SFDATrack, a generalized source-free domain adaptive tracker that merely leverages adverse weather samples from the target domain for robust state estimation. Specifically, SFDATrack first employs a mean-teacher backbone with Dual Interactive Mamba (DIM) blocks to distill the candidate target tokens that are resilient to weather variations from classified, augmented samples. Afterwards, we introduce a hyperspherical prototype projection (HPP) module to project these tokens onto multi-domain prototypes within a latent hyperspherical space. By enforcing both domain-specific and domain-invariant properties of the multi-domain prototypes, SFDATrack can be seamlessly adapted to diverse weather conditions with powerful generalizability. Extensive experiments evaluated on various benchmarks demonstrate that SFDATrack achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/watcherBR0/sfdatrack.
Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Moving Object Segmentation (MOS) are two fundamental tasks in computer vision that involve both spatial and temporal object dynamics. Existing methods rely predominantly on visual cues and thus often falter in real-world scenarios where object motions are inherently complex and nonlinear. To address this limitation, we propose SUMO, a zero-shot, training-free, unified framework integrating nonlinear dynamics with vision-based segmentation for accurate and consistent VOT and MOS. Specifically, we develop a nonlinear State Space Model (SSM) inspired by robotics principles to capture the complex object dynamics. Building on this model, we propose a Selective Unscented Filter (SUF) for accurate state estimation, which features a joint scoring mechanism and dynamically fuses multi-source predictions to identify the most plausible object state over time. Furthermore, we apply a memory selection mechanism to evaluate the reliability of memory frames. Our extensive experimental results show that SUMO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and MOS tasks.
Mohamad Alansari, Yonathan Michael, Hasan AlMarzouqi +3cs.CV
We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4--0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.
Traditional visual object tracking (VOT) methods typically rely on task-specific supervised training, limiting their generalization to unseen objects and challenging scenarios with distractors, occlusion, and nonlinear motion. Recent vision foundation models, exemplified by SAM 2, learn strong video understanding priors from large-scale pretraining and offer a promising foundation for building more robust and generalizable trackers. However, directly applying SAM 2 to VOT remains suboptimal, as it does not explicitly model target motion dynamics or enforce geometric and semantic consistency across frames, both of which are essential for reliable tracking. To address this issue, we propose SAMOSA, a new tracking framework that adapts SAM 2 to complex VOT scenarios by explicitly leveraging motion, geometry, and semantic cues. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight nonlinear motion predictor to model target dynamics and guide mask selection as well as memory filtering. We further exploit semantic cues to detect target shifts and recover from tracking failures, while geometric cues are incorporated as structural constraints to improve tracking stability. In this way, SAMOSA bridges the gap between the implicit video understanding prior of SAM 2 and explicit tracking-oriented modeling. Extensive experiments show that SAMOSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SAM 2--based approaches on general benchmarks, demonstrates stronger generalization than supervised VOT methods, and achieves substantial gains on anti-UAV datasets, which typify complex nonlinear motion scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/DurYi/SAMOSA.