Diem brought up the similarity of this work to Flexible Sprites and I'd like to expand on this.

Both papers use the graphical models framework and both setup the problem relatively similarly. I think the essential difference between the two works can be summarized as follows. Jojic & Frey focus their efforts on powerful graphical model techniques to solve the problem in a 'brute force' method -- one that incorporates as little additional information about the problem and domain. Zhou and Tao explicitly incorporate knowledge of the domain and use graphical models only as a framework, designing an algorithm adapted to the domain.

As a specific example, consider that Jojic & Frey don’t even have a motion model – that is you could reorder all the frames of a video and their technique still works. On the one hand this means that you don’t need a motion model to do tracking (at least on simple cases) – so possibly on very deviant motion a motionless model would do better. On the other hand that information is available and easy to incorporate – so doing so, as Zhou and Tao did, makes their technique more robust in typical tracking problems.

I think Zhou and Tao got it right. The paper by Jojic & Frey is more interesting from a graphical models standpoint, but it kind of misses the point – rather then throw extremely powerful graphical models machinery at the problem why not analyze the domain more carefully? Anyway, my guess is that the work by Zhou and Tao is much more robust.