ProTracker: Probabilistic Integration for Robust and Accurate Point Tracking

We propose ProTracker, a novel framework for accurate and robust long-term dense tracking of arbitrary points in videos. Previous methods relying on global cost volumes effectively handle large occlusions and scene changes but lack precision and temporal awareness. In contrast, local iteration-based methods accurately track smoothly transforming scenes but face challenges with occlusions and drift. To address these issues, we propose a probabilistic framework that marries the strengths of both paradigms by leveraging local optical flow for predictions and refined global heatmaps for observations. This design effectively combines global semantic information with temporally aware low-level features, enabling precise and robust long-term tracking of arbitrary points in videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProTracker attains state-of-the-art performance among optimization-based approaches and surpasses supervised feed-forward methods on multiple benchmarks. The code and model will be released after publication.

@article{zhang2025_2501.03220,
  title={ ProTracker: Probabilistic Integration for Robust and Accurate Point Tracking },
  author={ Tingyang Zhang and Chen Wang and Zhiyang Dou and Qingzhe Gao and Jiahui Lei and Baoquan Chen and Lingjie Liu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.03220},
  year={ 2025 }
}