Learning Motion Blur Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
You Wu, Xucheng Wang, Dan Zeng, Hengzhou Ye, Xiaolan Xie, Qijun Zhao, Shuiwang Li
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is critical for applications like surveillance, search-and-rescue, and autonomous navigation. However, the high-speed movement of UAVs and targets introduces unique challenges, including real-time processing demands and severe motion blur, which degrade the performance of existing generic trackers. While single-stream vision transformer (ViT) architectures have shown promise in visual tracking, their computational inefficiency and lack of UAV-specific optimizations limit their practicality in this domain. In this paper, we boost the efficiency of this framework by tailoring it into an adaptive computation framework that dynamically exits Transformer blocks for real-time UAV tracking. The motivation behind this is that tracking tasks with fewer challenges can be adequately addressed using low-level feature representations. Simpler tasks can often be handled with less demanding, lower-level features. This approach allows the model use computational resources more efficiently by focusing on complex tasks and conserving resources for easier ones. Another significant enhancement introduced in this paper is the improved effectiveness of ViTs in handling motion blur, a common issue in UAV tracking caused by the fast movements of either the UAV, the tracked objects, or both. This is achieved by acquiring motion blur robust representations through enforcing invariance in the feature representation of the target with respect to simulated motion blur. We refer to our proposed approach as BDTrack. Extensive experiments conducted on four tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach, demonstrating its potential as a practical and effective approach for real-time UAV tracking. Code is released at: https://github.com/wuyou3474/BDTrack.
Colledge of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Key Research Center for Surface Monitoring and Analysis of Cultural Relics (SMARC), State Administration of Cultural Heritage, China（国家文物局文物表面监测与分析重点研究中心）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学计算机科学与工程系）
Intuitively, motion blur may hurt the performance of visual object tracking. However, we lack quantitative evaluation of tracker robustness to different levels of motion blur. Meanwhile, while image deblurring methods can produce visually clearer videos for pleasing human eyes, it is unknown whether visual object tracking can benefit from image deblurring or not. In this paper, we address these two problems by constructing a Blurred Video Tracking benchmark, which contains a variety of videos with different levels of motion blurs, as well as ground truth tracking results for evaluating tracker…
UAUTrack: Towards Unified Multimodal Anti-UAV Visual Tracking
College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing（智能机器人与先进制造学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学）；Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based visual object tracking has enabled a wide range of applications and attracted increasing attention in the field of intelligent transportation systems because of its versatility and effectiveness. As an emerging force in the revolutionary trend of deep learning, Siamese networks shine in UAV-based object tracking with their promising balance of accuracy, robustness, and speed. Thanks to the development of embedded processors and the gradual optimization of deep neural networks, Siamese trackers receive extensive research and realize preliminary combinations w…
STATrack: A Target-Aware Fully Spiking Neural Network for Efficient UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）；School of Electronic Information, Central South University（中南大学电子信息学院）
TrackingMiM: Efficient Mamba-in-Mamba Serialization for Real-time UAV Object Tracking
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（电子与电气工程系，南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge（应用数学与理论物理系，剑桥大学）；State Grid Corporation of China（国家电网公司）；East China Institute of Computing Technology（东部计算技术研究所）；Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Robotics and Computer Vision（深圳机器人与计算机视觉重点实验室）
Tongji University（同济大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Correlation filter-based tracking has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with high efficiency. However, it has two imperfections, i.e., boundary effect and filter corruption. Several methods enlarging the search area can mitigate boundary effect, yet introducing undesired background distraction. Existing frame-by-frame context learning strategies for repressing background distraction nevertheless lower the tracking speed. Inspired by keyframe-based simultaneous localization and mapping, keyfilter is proposed in visual tracking for the first time, in order to handle the above …
MambaTrack: Exploiting Dual-Enhancement for Night UAV Tracking
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（合作 medi 创新中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；CloudWalk Technology（云从科技）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
CGTrack: Cascade Gating Network with Hierarchical Feature Aggregation for UAV Tracking
Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（杭州高等研究院，中国科学院大学）；Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas（计算机科学与工程系，北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院软件研究所）
Tongji University（同济大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Correlation filter (CF)-based methods have demonstrated exceptional performance in visual object tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, but suffer from the undesirable boundary effect. To solve this issue, spatially regularized correlation filters (SRDCF) proposes the spatial regularization to penalize filter coefficients, thereby significantly improving the tracking performance. However, the temporal information hidden in the response maps is not considered in SRDCF, which limits the discriminative power and the robustness for accurate tracking. This work proposes a novel ap…
Tongji University（同济大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Correlation filter (CF) has recently exhibited promising performance in visual object tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Such online learning method heavily depends on the quality of the training-set, yet complicated aerial scenarios like occlusion or out of view can reduce its reliability. In this work, a novel time slot-based distillation approach is proposed to efficiently and effectively optimize the training-set's quality on the fly. A cooperative energy minimization function is established to score the historical samples adaptively. To accelerate the scoring process, frames with…
Visual object tracking, which is representing a major interest in image processing field, has facilitated numerous real world applications. Among them, equipping unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with real time robust visual trackers for all day aerial maneuver, is currently attracting incremental attention and has remarkably broadened the scope of applications of object tracking. However, prior tracking methods have merely focused on robust tracking in the well-illuminated scenes, while ignoring trackers' capabilities to be deployed in the dark. In darkness, the conditions can be more complex and…
Single visual object tracking from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) poses fundamental challenges such as object occlusion, small-scale objects, background clutter, and abrupt camera motion. To tackle these difficulties, we propose to integrate the 3D structure of the observed scene into a detection-by-tracking algorithm. We introduce a pipeline that combines a model-free visual object tracker, a sparse 3D reconstruction, and a state estimator. The 3D reconstruction of the scene is computed with an image-based Structure-from-Motion (SfM) component that enables us to leverage a state estimator i…
Tongji University（同济大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Due to implicitly introduced periodic shifting of limited searching area, visual object tracking using correlation filters often has to confront undesired boundary effect. As boundary effect severely degrade the quality of object model, it has made it a challenging task for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to perform robust and accurate object following. Traditional hand-crafted features are also not precise and robust enough to describe the object in the viewing point of UAV. In this work, a novel tracker with online enhanced background learning is specifically proposed to tackle boundary effec…
STCMOT: Spatio-Temporal Cohesion Learning for UAV-Based Multiple Object Tracking
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Optics and Electronics（光电技术研究所）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
Recently, correlation filter has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking due to its high frame rates, robustness and low calculation resources. However, it is fragile because of two inherent defects, i.e, boundary effect and filter corruption. Some methods by enlarging the search area can mitigate the boundary effect, yet introducing the undesired background distractors. Another approaches can alleviate the temporal degeneration of learned filters by introducing the temporal regularizer, which depends on the assumption that the filers between consecutive frames should be …
Current unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) visual tracking algorithms are primarily limited with respect to: (i) the kind of size variation they can deal with, (ii) the implementation speed which hardly meets the real-time requirement. In this work, a real-time UAV tracking algorithm with powerful size estimation ability is proposed. Specifically, the overall tracking task is allocated to two 2D filters: (i) translation filter for location prediction in the space domain, (ii) size filter for scale and aspect ratio optimization in the size domain. Besides, an efficient two-stage re-detection strateg…
BuckTales : A multi-UAV dataset for multi-object tracking and re-identification of wild antelopes
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior（马克斯·普朗克动物行为研究所）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；BITS Pilani Hyderabad（BITS Pilani海得拉巴校区）
Tongji University（同济大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Vision-based object tracking has boosted extensive autonomous applications for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, the dynamic changes in flight maneuver and viewpoint encountered in UAV tracking pose significant difficulties, e.g. , aspect ratio change, and scale variation. The conventional cross-correlation operation, while commonly used, has limitations in effectively capturing perceptual similarity and incorporates extraneous background information. To mitigate these limitations, this work presents a novel saliency-guided dynamic vision Transformer (SGDViT) for UAV tracking. The prop…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Kyushu University（九州大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Zhejiang Sci-Tech University（浙江理工大学）
Motion blur caused by the moving of the object or camera during the exposure can be a key challenge for visual object tracking, affecting tracking accuracy significantly. In this work, we explore the robustness of visual object trackers against motion blur from a new angle, i.e., adversarial blur attack (ABA). Our main objective is to online transfer input frames to their natural motion-blurred counterparts while misleading the state-of-the-art trackers during the tracking process. To this end, we first design the motion blur synthesizing method for visual tracking based on the generation prin…
Visual tracking has yielded promising applications with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In literature, the advanced discriminative correlation filter (DCF) type trackers generally distinguish the foreground from the background with a learned regressor which regresses the implicit circulated samples into a fixed target label. However, the predefined and unchanged regression target results in low robustness and adaptivity to uncertain aerial tracking scenarios. In this work, we exploit the local maximum points of the response map generated in the detection phase to automatically locate current di…
Aerial tracking, which has exhibited its omnipresent dedication and splendid performance, is one of the most active applications in the remote sensing field. Especially, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing system, equipped with a visual tracking approach, has been widely used in aviation, navigation, agriculture,transportation, and public security, etc. As is mentioned above, the UAV-based aerial tracking platform has been gradually developed from research to practical application stage, reaching one of the main aerial remote sensing technologies in the future. However, due to t…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based visual tracking has been confronted with numerous challenges, e.g., object motion and occlusion. These challenges generally introduce unexpected mutations of target appearance and result in tracking failure. However, prevalent discriminative correlation filter (DCF) based trackers are insensitive to target mutations due to a predefined label, which concentrates on merely the centre of the training region. Meanwhile, appearance mutations caused by occlusion or similar objects usually lead to the inevitable learning of wrong information. To cope with appearanc…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
We propose TRADE for robust tracking and 3D localization of a moving target in cluttered environments, from UAVs equipped with a single camera. Ultimately TRADE enables 3d-aware target following. Tracking-by-detection approaches are vulnerable to target switching, especially between similar objects. Thus, TRADE predicts and incorporates the target 3D trajectory to select the right target from the tracker's response map. Unlike static environments, depth estimation of a moving target from a single camera is a ill-posed problem. Therefore we propose a novel 3D localization method for ground targ…
Tongji University（同济大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Object tracking has been broadly applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tasks in recent years. However, existing algorithms still face difficulties such as partial occlusion, clutter background, and other challenging visual factors. Inspired by the cutting-edge attention mechanisms, a novel object tracking framework is proposed to leverage multi-level visual attention. Three primary attention, i.e., contextual attention, dimensional attention, and spatiotemporal attention, are integrated into the training and detection stages of correlation filter-based tracking pipeline. Therefore, the prop…
School of Robotics, Hunan University（湖南大学机器人学院）；College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学电气与信息工程学院）；Technical University Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking has wide potential applications in such as agriculture, navigation, and public security. However, the limitations of computing resources, battery capacity, and maximum load of UAV hinder the deployment of deep learning-based tracking algorithms on UAV. Consequently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF) trackers stand out in the UAV tracking community because of their high efficiency. However, their precision is usually much lower than trackers based on deep learning. Model compression is a promising way to narrow the gap (i.e., effciency, precision) b…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely used in various fields, and their invasion of security and privacy has aroused social concern. Several detection and tracking systems for UAVs have been introduced in recent years, but most of them are based on radio frequency, radar, and other media. We assume that the field of computer vision is mature enough to detect and track invading UAVs. Thus we propose a visible light mode dataset called Dalian University of Technology Anti-UAV dataset, DUT Anti-UAV for short. It contains a detection dataset with a total of 10,000 images and a tracking d…
University of Chinese Academic of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute of North Electronic Equipment（北方电子设备研究所）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) offers lots of applications in both commerce and recreation. With this, monitoring the operation status of UAVs is crucially important. In this work, we consider the task of tracking UAVs, providing rich information such as location and trajectory. To facilitate research on this topic, we propose a dataset, Anti-UAV, with more than 300 video pairs containing over 580k manually annotated bounding boxes. The releasing of such a large-scale dataset could be a useful initial step in research of tracking UAVs. Furthermore, the advancement of addressing research challen…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院数字地球科学重点实验室）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenge…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；CloudWalk Technology Co., Ltd（云从科技有限公司）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；JD Explore Academy in JD.com（京东集团京东探索研究院）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is of great significance for a wide range of applications, such as delivery and agriculture. Previous benchmarks in this area mainly focused on small-scale tracking problems while ignoring the amounts of data, types of data modalities, diversities of target categories and scenarios, and evaluation protocols involved, greatly hiding the massive power of deep UAV tracking. In this work, we propose WebUAV-3M, the largest public UAV tracking benchmark to date, to facilitate both the development and evaluation of deep UAV trackers. WebUAV-3M contains over 3.3 …
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based tracking is attracting increasing attention and developing rapidly in applications such as agriculture, aviation, navigation, transportation and public security. Recently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF)-based trackers have stood out in UAV tracking community for their high efficiency and appealing robustness on a single CPU. However, due to limited onboard computation resources and other challenges the efficiency and accuracy of existing DCF-based approaches is still not satisfying. In this paper, we explore using segmentation by the GrabCut to imp…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Space Engineering University（航天工程大学）；Chongqing Innovation Center, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学重庆创新中心）
How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；CloudWalk Technology Co., Ltd（云walk科技有限公司）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）；School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学航空宇航学院）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
