{"ID":2846239,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02591","arxiv_id":"2511.02591","title":"Zero-Shot Multi-Animal Tracking in the Wild","abstract":"Multi-animal tracking is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior. However, it remains a challenging task due to variations in habitat, motion patterns, and species appearance. Traditional approaches typically require extensive model fine-tuning and heuristic design for each application scenario. In this work, we explore the potential of recent vision foundation models for zero-shot multi-animal tracking. By combining a Grounding Dino object detector with the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) tracker and carefully designed heuristics, we develop a tracking framework that can be applied to new datasets without any retraining or hyperparameter adaptation. Evaluations on ChimpAct, Bird Flock Tracking, AnimalTrack, and a subset of GMOT-40 demonstrate strong and consistent performance across diverse species and environments. The code is available at https://github.com/ecker-lab/SAM2-Animal-Tracking.","short_abstract":"Multi-animal tracking is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior. However, it remains a challenging task due to variations in habitat, motion patterns, and species appearance. Traditional approaches typically require extensive model fine-tuning and heuristic design for each application scenario. In this w...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02591","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02591v1","authors":"[\"Jan Frederik Meier\",\"Timo Lüddecke\"]","published":"2025-11-04T14:12:03Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":607422,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2846239,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02591","paper_title":"Zero-Shot Multi-Animal Tracking in the Wild","repo_url":"https://github.com/ecker-lab/SAM2-Animal-Tracking","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}