AnthroTAP: Learning Point Tracking with Real-World Motion

Point tracking models often struggle to generalize to real-world videos because large-scale training data is predominantly synthetic--the only source currently feasible to produce at scale. Collecting real-world annotations, however, is prohibitively expensive, as it requires tracking hundreds of points across frames. We introduce AnthroTAP, an automated pipeline that generates large-scale pseudo-labeled point tracking data from real human motion videos. Leveraging the structured complexity of human movement-non-rigid deformations, articulated motion, and frequent occlusions—AnthroTAP fits Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) models to detected humans, projects mesh vertices onto image planes, resolves occlusions via ray-casting, and filters unreliable tracks using optical flow consistency. A model trained on the AnthroTAP dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance on TAP-Vid, outperforming recent self-supervised teacher-student models trained on vastly larger real datasets, while requiring only one day of training on 4 GPUs. AnthroTAP shows that structured human motion offers a scalable and effective source of real-world supervision for point tracking. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.