What is Zero Shot Object Tracking?

Roboflow has introduced a new capability that allows users to track objects frame by frame in videos and camera streams using their Inference API and a zero-shot object tracking repository, without the need for a separate classifier. Traditionally, object tracking required a separate featurizer model fine-tuned with additional annotations, but this process has been simplified by leveraging OpenAI's CLIP model, which provides robust image features across various domains. By using generalized CLIP object features, users can avoid the additional steps of creating object track annotations and training another model. The process involves constructing a custom object detection model in Roboflow, obtaining an API endpoint and key, and using the zero-shot object tracking repository to track objects without further modeling requirements. This development allows for efficient real-time object tracking on the edge, with the option to improve track performance by increasing the processing frame rate.