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gaomingqi/track-anything

★ 6,953PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

TLDR

Track-Anything lets you click on any object in a video and it automatically follows and outlines that object through every frame, with an option to erase it from the video and fill in the background behind it.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Track-Anything))
    What it does
      Click-to-track objects
      Frame-by-frame masks
      Object removal
    Tech Stack
      Python
      Segment Anything Meta
      XMem tracker
      E2FGVI inpainting
    Use Cases
      Video annotation
      Object removal
      Research datasets
    Features
      Multi-object tracking
      Camera cut handling
      Interactive correction
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Click to track a moving person or object through a long video for annotation datasets or video editing.

USE CASE 2

Remove an unwanted object from a video by selecting it with a click and letting the tool fill in the background automatically.

USE CASE 3

Annotate multiple objects simultaneously in a research dataset with interactive corrections when the tracker drifts.

USE CASE 4

Build a video editing pipeline that can isolate and track moving subjects without manual frame-by-frame work.

Tech stack

PythonPyTorchSegment AnythingXMemGradio

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a GPU with sufficient VRAM to run Segment Anything and XMem simultaneously, a Hugging Face demo is available to try without local setup.

In plain English

Track-Anything is a Python tool that lets you click on an object in a video and have it automatically follow and outline that object through every subsequent frame. You do not need to write any code or draw precise boundaries yourself, you just click on what you want to track and the system does the rest. Under the hood, it combines three separate AI models. Segment Anything (from Meta) handles the initial click-to-outline step: you click a point on an object and it generates a precise mask around that object. XMem then propagates that mask across video frames, keeping track of the object as it moves, changes size, or gets temporarily hidden. If you want to remove an object from the video rather than just track it, a third model called E2FGVI fills in the background behind it so the object appears to have never been there. The tool handles several scenarios that simpler trackers cannot: tracking multiple objects at the same time, handling camera cuts (where the scene changes abruptly), and letting you interactively correct the tracking region if the model drifts onto the wrong area mid-video. These features make it useful for video annotation work, where a human expert can guide the AI and fix mistakes in real time. Setup is a standard Python install: clone the repository, install dependencies, and run a single command to start a browser-based interface. A live demo is available on Hugging Face for trying it without any local setup. The project is a research tool from the SUSTech VIP Lab, published in 2023. It is not a commercial product and the README is primarily aimed at researchers and developers who want to use or build on these capabilities.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Set up Track-Anything locally and use it to track a moving car through a 2-minute video clip, exporting the segmentation masks for each frame.
Prompt 2
Use Track-Anything to remove a watermark from a video by clicking on it and applying the E2FGVI background inpainting model.
Prompt 3
Configure Track-Anything to track three different people simultaneously in a crowd scene and handle a mid-video camera cut.
Prompt 4
Interactively correct a drifting Track-Anything mask mid-video when the tracker has latched onto the wrong object.
Prompt 5
Set up the Track-Anything Gradio interface locally on a machine with a GPU and process a 10-minute research video for object segmentation.
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