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

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.