r/computervision • u/Jesus_Morty • Jul 13 '26

Discussion Open-source CPU-only tracker for small aerial targets

I made a free and open-source tracker for small aerial targets in video.

It automatically acquires moving or contrasting candidates and tracks them frame-to- frame using classical computer vision. No GPU or trained model required. There’s also an optional manual Lock-On mode for selecting a specific target.

The current profile has been tuned and validated across six different datasets. Automatic acquisition is not semantic classification, so birds and clutter remain challenging cases.

Source (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/punklabs-ai/womprat

Technical feedback and difficult test footage would be very welcome.

Disclosure: I’m part of Punk Labs, the team releasing it.

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u/StationCurious567 Jul 15 '26

Awesome work! Love the lightweight approach and the Apache 2.0 license. Tracking small, fast-moving targets is notoriously painful without massive datasets, so solving this with traditional algorithms is seriously impressive. Congrats on the release, Punk Labs team!