Learning to Track Any Points from Human Motion

Abstract: Human motion, with its inherent complexities, such as non-rigid deformations, articulated movements, clothing distortions, and frequent occlusions caused by limbs or other individuals, provides a rich and challenging source of supervision that is crucial for training robust and generalizable point trackers. Despite the suitability of human motion, acquiring extensive training data for point tracking remains difficult due to laborious manual annotation. Our proposed pipeline, AnthroTAP, addresses this by proposing an automated pipeline to generate pseudo-labeled training data, leveraging the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model. We first fit the SMPL model to detected humans in video frames, project the resulting 3D mesh vertices onto 2D image planes to generate pseudo-trajectories, handle occlusions using ray-casting, and filter out unreliable tracks based on optical flow consistency. A point tracking model trained on AnthroTAP annotated dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TAP-Vid benchmark, surpassing other models trained on real videos while using 10,000 times less data and only 1 day in 4 GPUs, compared to 256 GPUs used in recent state-of-the-art.