Attention to Trajectory: Trajectory-Aware Open-Vocabulary Tracking

Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking (OV-MOT) aims to enable approaches to track objects without being limited to a predefined set of categories. Current OV-MOT methods typically rely primarily on instance-level detection and association, often overlooking trajectory information that is unique and essential for object tracking tasks. Utilizing trajectory information can enhance association stability and classification accuracy, especially in cases of occlusion and category ambiguity, thereby improving adaptability to novel classes. Thus motivated, in this paper we propose TRACT, an open-vocabulary tracker that leverages trajectory information to improve both object association and classification in OV-MOT. Specifically, we introduce a Trajectory Consistency Reinforcement (TCR) strategy, that benefits tracking performance by improving target identity and category consistency. In addition, we present TraCLIP, a plug-and-play trajectory classification module. It integrates Trajectory Feature Aggregation (TFA) and Trajectory Semantic Enrichment (TSE) strategies to fully leverage trajectory information from visual and language perspectives for enhancing the classification results. Extensive experiments on OV-TAO show that our TRACT significantly improves tracking performance, highlighting trajectory information as a valuable asset for OV-MOT. Code will be released.