TAPIP3D: Tracking Any Point in Persistent 3D Geometry
Authors: name: Bowei Zhang, name: Lei Ke, name: Adam W. Harley, name: Katerina Fragkiadaki

We introduce TAPIP3D, a novel approach for long-term 3D point tracking in
monocular RGB and RGB-D videos. TAPIP3D represents videos as camera-stabilized
spatio-temporal feature clouds, leveraging depth and camera motion information
to lift 2D video features into a 3D world space where camera motion is
effectively canceled. TAPIP3D iteratively refines multi-frame 3D motion
estimates within this stabilized representation, enabling robust tracking over
extended periods. To manage the inherent irregularities of 3D point
distributions, we propose a Local Pair Attention mechanism. This 3D
contextualization strategy effectively exploits spatial relationships in 3D,
forming informative feature neighborhoods for precise 3D trajectory estimation.
Our 3D-centric approach significantly outperforms existing 3D point tracking
methods and even enhances 2D tracking accuracy compared to conventional 2D
pixel trackers when accurate depth is available. It supports inference in both
camera coordinates (i.e., unstabilized) and world coordinates, and our results
demonstrate that compensating for camera motion improves tracking performance.
Our approach replaces the conventional 2D square correlation neighborhoods used
in prior 2D and 3D trackers, leading to more robust and accurate results across
various 3D point tracking benchmarks. Project Page: https://tapip3d.github.io