Zero-Shot Multi-Animal Tracking in the Wild

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Meier, Jan Frederik, Lüddecke, Timo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910280559099904
author Meier, Jan Frederik
Lüddecke, Timo
author_facet Meier, Jan Frederik
Lüddecke, Timo
contents Multi-animal tracking is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior, yet remains challenging due to variations in habitat, motion patterns, and species appearance. Traditional approaches typically require extensive fine-tuning and heuristic design for each new scenario. In this work, we explore vision foundation models for zero-shot multi-animal tracking. Building on SAM2MOT, we combine Grounding DINO with the Segment Anything Model2 (SAM 2) and introduce three targeted modifications to adapt the framework to animal appearance and behavior without any retraining or hyperparameter tuning between datasets. We also evaluate the recent SAM3 model, but identify practical limitations that restrict its applicability to multi-animal tracking in the wild. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across Chimp-Act, Bird Flock Tracking, AnimalTrack, and a subset of GMOT-40, demonstrating robust generalization across diverse species and environments. The code is available at https://github.com/ecker-lab/SAM2-Animal-Tracking.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_02591
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-Shot Multi-Animal Tracking in the Wild
Meier, Jan Frederik
Lüddecke, Timo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multi-animal tracking is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior, yet remains challenging due to variations in habitat, motion patterns, and species appearance. Traditional approaches typically require extensive fine-tuning and heuristic design for each new scenario. In this work, we explore vision foundation models for zero-shot multi-animal tracking. Building on SAM2MOT, we combine Grounding DINO with the Segment Anything Model2 (SAM 2) and introduce three targeted modifications to adapt the framework to animal appearance and behavior without any retraining or hyperparameter tuning between datasets. We also evaluate the recent SAM3 model, but identify practical limitations that restrict its applicability to multi-animal tracking in the wild. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across Chimp-Act, Bird Flock Tracking, AnimalTrack, and a subset of GMOT-40, demonstrating robust generalization across diverse species and environments. The code is available at https://github.com/ecker-lab/SAM2-Animal-Tracking.
title Zero-Shot Multi-Animal Tracking in the Wild
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02591