[HN Gopher] AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High R...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolution
        
       Author : lnyan
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2025-06-21 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (alltracker.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (alltracker.github.io)
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | Crazy slick results. Nicely done team!
        
       | upghost wrote:
       | > The utility of optical flow (i.e., the instantaneous velocity
       | of pixels [16]) toward this goal has long been obvious, yet it
       | has remained challenging to upgrade flows into long-range tracks.
       | 
       | This sentence from the paper makes me feel a little bad that I
       | don't understand why this goal is obvious. I am not tracking why
       | we are tracking pixels.
       | 
       | Is this basically a competing technology with YOLO[1] or SAM[2]?
       | 
       | [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Look_Once
       | 
       | [2]: https://ai.meta.com/sam2/
       | 
       | Edit: added annotations, should've done that initially
        
         | sheepscreek wrote:
         | I'm not remotely familiar with either YOLO or SAM, but want to
         | add my own question here. Does the utility of this invention
         | have something to do with the tracking of subjects, like auto-
         | focus for cameras and robotics (to keep the subject in view)?
        
           | upghost wrote:
           | Apologies, jargon meanings updated.
        
         | markisus wrote:
         | Back in my earlier days working on autonomous vehicles, I
         | dreamed of something like this.
         | 
         | The issue with bounding boxes is missed detections, occlusions,
         | and impoverished geometrical information. But if you have a
         | hundred points being stably tracked on an object, it's now much
         | easier to keep tracking it through partial occlusions, figure
         | out its 3D geometry and kinematics, and even re-identify it
         | coming in and out of occlusion.
        
         | daemonologist wrote:
         | No, this performs the same task as CoTracker or TAPIR, but
         | intended for running at a higher resolution. Point tracking is
         | useful both for keeping track of the position of a target and
         | for "inside-out" positioning of the camera.
         | 
         | YOLO is mostly concerned with detecting objects of certain
         | classes in a single image, and SAM is concerned with
         | essentially classifying pixels as belonging to an object or
         | not.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-06-21 23:00 UTC)