Occlusion-Aware Multi-Object Tracking in Vineyards via SAM-Based Visibility Modeling

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in vineyard environments remains challenging due to frequent and long-term occlusions caused by dense foliage, overlapping grape clusters, and complex plant structures. These characteristics often result in identity switches and fragmented trajectories when using conventional tracking methods. This paper proposes OATSAM-Track, an occlusion-aware multi-object tracking framework designed for vineyard fruit monitoring. The framework integrates lightweight MobileSAM-assisted instance segmentation to estimate target visibility and occlusion severity. Occlusion-state reasoning is further incorporated into temporal association, appearance memory updating, and identity recovery. An adaptive temporal memory mechanism selectively updates appearance features according to predicted occlusion states, reducing identity drift under partial and severe occlusions. To facilitate occlusion-aware evaluation, an extended vineyard multi-object tracking dataset (GrapeOcclusionMOTS) with SAM-refined instance masks and fine-grained occlusion annotations is constructed. The experimental results demonstrate that OATSAM-Track improves identity consistency and tracking robustness compared to representative baseline trackers, particularly under medium and severe occlusion scenarios. These results indicate that explicit occlusion modeling is beneficial for reliable fruit monitoring in precision agriculture.