CoTracker

Transformer model from Meta AI that tracks any point through a video, jointly and through occlusions.

Open SourceSelf HostedOffline CapableGPU Required
0.0 (0)

About

Point tracking gets a joint treatment in CoTracker, the transformer from Meta AI and Oxford VGG that follows quasi-dense sets of pixels through a video together rather than independently, letting correlated points support each other through occlusions. The third release, CoTracker3, arrived in October 2024 with a simplified architecture and a pseudo-labeling pipeline over real videos that the authors report reaching state-of-the-art accuracy with 1,000x less training data than prior trackers, and a matching Kubric dataset followed in January 2025. Points can be selected manually or sampled on a grid, processed in online mode for streaming video or offline mode for full clips. Usage is a torch.hub one-liner or a local install, with a Hugging Face Space demo and a Colab notebook for trying it without setup, and a GPU is strongly recommended for local runs. Most of the code and the checkpoints are released under CC-BY-NC 4.0, restricting use to non-commercial research, with some files under MIT and Apache-2.0. Video editing, robotics, and 3D reconstruction pipelines rely on it wherever long-range pixel correspondence matters.

Should you use CoTracker?

Pick it when

Pick CoTracker for non-commercial research or prototypes that need long-range pixel correspondence through occlusions, such as video editing effects, robot manipulation studies or 3D reconstruction from video, on a GPU.

Look elsewhere when

Skip it for commercial products: most code and checkpoints are CC-BY-NC 4.0. If you need whole-object masks rather than points, SAM 2 is Apache 2.0, and for counting objects ByteTrack is the right tool.

Alternatives to CoTracker

  • Segment Anything 2

    Tracks whole objects as masks from a click or box under Apache 2.0, so it is commercial-friendly, but gives no dense per-pixel trajectories.

  • Track Anything

    Click-to-select mask tracking with mid-clip corrections for annotation and object removal, MIT code, but object-level masks rather than pixel trajectories.

  • ByteTrack

    MIT tracker that links detector boxes into IDs for many objects at speed, but it knows nothing about individual pixels or deformation.

  • Kornia

    Apache 2.0 differentiable feature matching between frame pairs, fine for sparse correspondences, but no long-range tracking through occlusions.

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