Reproduce “Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time” on OpenResearch

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About this paper

Alaa Maalouf, Ninad Jadhav, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Makram Chahine, Daniel M.Vogt, Robert J. Wood, Antonio Torralba, Daniela Rus

Follow Anything (FAn) is a real-time robotic system developed at MIT and Harvard for open-set detection, tracking, and following of any object using multimodal queries. It achieves 6-20 frames per second on commodity hardware and demonstrates robust performance in autonomously tracking diverse objects like RC cars and drones in dynamic environments.

Key insights

  • Real-time open-set object following on commodity hardware is achievable by carefully optimizing and integrating large foundation models.
  • A DINO-based direct detection approach (DINO-SOLO) offers a substantial speed-accuracy trade-off, enabling high frame rates with good detection accuracy but less refined masks compared to SAM.
  • Multimodal querying and robust re-detection strategies, including cross-trajectory feature comparison, are crucial for maintaining object tracking in dynamic and challenging environments.

Summary by alphaXiv.

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