SatSAM2: Motion-Constrained Video Object Tracking in Satellite Imagery using Promptable SAM2 and Kalman Priors

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18264v2
• Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:58:49 GMT
• Title: SatSAM2: Motion-Constrained Video Object Tracking in Satellite Imagery using Promptable SAM2 and Kalman Priors
• Abstract summary: SatSAM2 is a zero-shot satellite video tracker built on SAM2, designed to adapt foundation models to the remote sensing domain.<n>SatSAM2 introduces two core modules: a Kalman Filter-based Constrained Motion Module (KFCMM) to exploit temporal motion cues and suppress drift, and a Motion-Constrained State Machine (MCSM) to regulate tracking states based on motion dynamics and reliability.
• Score: 27.70977432719396
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Existing satellite video tracking methods often struggle with generalization, requiring scenario-specific training to achieve satisfactory performance, and are prone to track loss in the presence of occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose SatSAM2, a zero-shot satellite video tracker built on SAM2, designed to adapt foundation models to the remote sensing domain. SatSAM2 introduces two core modules: a Kalman Filter-based Constrained Motion Module (KFCMM) to exploit temporal motion cues and suppress drift, and a Motion-Constrained State Machine (MCSM) to regulate tracking states based on motion dynamics and reliability. To support large-scale evaluation, we propose MatrixCity Video Object Tracking (MVOT), a synthetic benchmark containing 1,500+ sequences and 157K annotated frames with diverse viewpoints, illumination, and occlusion conditions. Extensive experiments on two satellite tracking benchmarks and MVOT show that SatSAM2 outperforms both traditional and foundation model-based trackers, including SAM2 and its variants. Notably, on the OOTB dataset, SatSAM2 achieves a 5.84% AUC improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly released to encourage further research.

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