TAPTRv3: Spatial and Temporal Context Foster Robust Tracking of Any Point in Long Video

In this paper, built upon TAPTRv2, we present TAPTRv3. TAPTRv2 is a simple yet effective DETR-like point tracking framework that works fine in regular videos but tends to fail in long videos. TAPTRv3 improves TAPTRv2 by addressing its shortcomings in querying high-quality features from long videos, where the target tracking points normally undergo increasing variation over time. In TAPTRv3, we propose to utilize both spatial and temporal context to bring better feature querying along the spatial and temporal dimensions for more robust tracking in long videos. For better spatial feature querying, we identify that off-the-shelf attention mechanisms struggle with point-level tasks and present Context-aware Cross-Attention (CCA). CCA introduces spatial context into the attention mechanism to enhance the quality of attention scores when querying image features. For better temporal feature querying, we introduce Visibility-aware Long-Temporal Attention (VLTA), which conducts temporal attention over past frames while considering their corresponding visibilities. This effectively addresses the feature drifting problem in TAPTRv2 caused by its RNN-like long-term modeling. TAPTRv3 surpasses TAPTRv2 by a large margin on most of the challenging datasets and obtains state-of-the-art performance. Even when compared with methods trained on large-scale extra internal data, TAPTRv3 still demonstrates superiority.