Track and Caption Any Motion: Open-Vocabulary Spatiotemporal Captioning via Trajectory-Conditioned Generation
About
We present TCAM (Track and Caption Any Motion), a generative framework that watches a video and with no text query and no region prompt decides what is moving, describes each motion in open vocabulary, locates it in time, and points to the exact trajectories that carry it. Two mature lines of work make this possible yet leave it unsolved: dense point trackers follow pixels with sub-object precision but emit no language, while video-language models produce fluent descriptions only when handed a query and only from clip-level features that cannot resolve which pixels move. Object-level captioners narrow the gap but still reason over detector boxes or masks, never reaching individual trajectories. TCAM couples tracking and language at point granularity through a Caption-Aware Resampler, where a small set of learnable queries cross-attends to dense point trajectory tokens and distills them into a fixed-length motion context that conditions a language decoder. The decoder generates an entire video's events in a single pass, each with a free-form caption, a start and end time, and a pointer to the trajectories it refers to, for sequential events and several subjects active at once. Training uses only existing segmentation annotations, with no extra event labeling, to supervise caption quality, pointer-mask alignment, and pointer diversity. On over 50K clips, TCAM outperforms dense video captioning baselines and matches dedicated, query-based grounding and point-tracking methods despite using no query, showing that trajectory-conditioned generation is a direct route to motion-driven video understanding.