CoTracker
Transformer model from Meta AI that tracks any point through a video, jointly and through occlusions.
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.
Reviews (0)
Leave a Review
No reviews yet. Be the first to review!
Details
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- CC-BY-NC-4.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026