Aerial Tracking Research Articles

Contextual Enhancement–Interaction and Multi-Scale Weighted Fusion Network for Aerial Tracking

Siamese-based trackers have been widely utilized in UAV visual tracking due to their outstanding performance. However, UAV visual tracking encounters numerous challenges, such as similar targets, scale variations, and background clutter. Existing Siamese trackers face two significant issues: firstly, they rely on single-branch features, limiting their ability to achieve long-term and accurate aerial tracking. Secondly, current tracking algorithms treat multi-level similarity responses equally, making it difficult to ensure tracking accuracy in complex airborne environments. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel UAV tracking Siamese network named the contextual enhancement–interaction and multi-scale weighted fusion network, which is designed to improve aerial tracking performance. Firstly, we designed a contextual enhancement–interaction module to improve feature representation. This module effectively facilitates the interaction between the template and search branches and strengthens the features of each branch in parallel. Specifically, a cross-attention mechanism within the module integrates the branch information effectively. The parallel Transformer-based enhancement structure improves the feature saliency significantly. Additionally, we designed an efficient multi-scale weighted fusion module that adaptively weights the correlation response maps across different feature scales. This module fully utilizes the global similarity response between the template and the search area, enhancing feature distinctiveness and improving tracking results. We conducted experiments using several state-of-the-art trackers on aerial tracking benchmarks, including DTB70, UAV123, UAV20L, and UAV123@10fps, to validate the efficacy of the proposed network. The experimental results demonstrate that our tracker performs effectively in complex aerial tracking scenarios and competes well with state-of-the-art trackers.

BACTrack: Building Appearance Collection for Aerial Tracking

BACTrack: Building Appearance Collection for Aerial Tracking

GGMNet: Pavement-Crack Detection Based on Global Context Awareness and Multi-Scale Fusion

Accurate and comprehensive detection of pavement cracks is important for maintaining road quality and ensuring traffic safety. However, the complexity of road surfaces and the diversity of cracks make it difficult for existing methods to accomplish this challenging task. This paper proposes a novel network named the global graph multiscale network (GGMNet) for automated pixel-level detection of pavement cracks. The GGMNet network has several innovations compared with the mainstream road crack detection network: (1) a global contextual Res-block (GC-Resblock) is proposed to guide the network to emphasize the identities of cracks while suppressing background noises; (2) a graph pyramid pooling module (GPPM) is designed to aggregate the multi-scale features and capture the long-range dependencies of cracks; (3) a multi-scale features fusion module (MFF) is established to efficiently represent and deeply fuse multi-scale features. We carried out extensive experiments on three pavement crack datasets. These were DeepCrack dataset, with complex background noises; the CrackTree260 dataset, with various crack structures; and the Aerial Track Detection dataset, with a drone’s perspective. The experimental results demonstrate that GGMNet has excellent performance, high accuracy, and strong robustness. In conclusion, this paper provides support for accurate and timely road maintenance and has important reference values and enlightening implications for further linear feature extraction research.

A Two-Stage Method for Aerial Tracking in Adverse Weather Conditions

A Two-Stage Method for Aerial Tracking in Adverse Weather Conditions

Cross-Parallel Attention and Efficient Match Transformer for Aerial Tracking

Visual object tracking is a key technology that is used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to achieve autonomous navigation. In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning, tracking algorithms based on Siamese neural networks have received widespread attention. However, because of complex and diverse tracking scenarios, as well as limited computational resources, most existing tracking algorithms struggle to ensure real-time stable operation while improving tracking performance. Therefore, studying efficient and fast-tracking frameworks, and enhancing the ability of algorithms to respond to complex scenarios has become crucial. Therefore, this paper proposes a cross-parallel attention and efficient match transformer for aerial tracking (SiamEMT). Firstly, we carefully designed the cross-parallel attention mechanism to encode global feature information and to achieve cross-dimensional interaction and feature correlation aggregation via parallel branches, highlighting feature saliency and reducing global redundancy information, as well as improving the tracking algorithm’s ability to distinguish between targets and backgrounds. Meanwhile, we implemented an efficient match transformer to achieve feature matching. This network utilizes parallel, lightweight, multi-head attention mechanisms to pass template information to the search region features, better matching the global similarity between the template and search regions, and improving the algorithm’s ability to perceive target location and feature information. Experiments on multiple drone public benchmark tests verified the accuracy and robustness of the proposed tracker in drone tracking scenarios. In addition, on the embedded artificial intelligence (AI) platform AGX Xavier, our algorithm achieved real-time tracking speed, indicating that our algorithm can be effectively applied to UAV tracking scenarios.

SVPTO: Safe Visibility-Guided Perception-Aware Trajectory Optimization for Aerial Tracking

In this article, we propose a safe visibility-guided perception-aware trajectory optimization method for aerial tracking, which can handle occlusion and collision in complex environments simultaneously. Different from the existing methods, the key idea of the proposed method is to actively adjust the relative distance and angle between the quadrotor and the target to avoid occlusion and collision with obstacles. Specifically, a novel field of view (FOV) based metric is proposed to avoid the occlusion of the target from obstacles. On this basis, the complexity of the environment is also introduced to adjust the relative distance between the quadrotor and the target to further reduce the probability of occlusion. Then, a critical relative angle is proposed to enhance the obstacle perception in the quadrotor motion direction. In addition, a time optimization method is proposed to improve the smoothness of quadrotor flight. Finally, comparative simulation and real-world experiments are conducted to verify the superior performance including both the visibility and safety of the proposed method.

Target-aware pooling combining global contexts for aerial tracking

Target-aware pooling combining global contexts for aerial tracking

Lightweight Spatial-Temporal Contextual Aggregation Siamese Network for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tracking

Benefiting from the powerful feature extraction capability of deep learning, the Siamese tracker stands out due to its advanced tracking performance. However, constrained by the complex backgrounds of aerial tracking, such as low resolution, occlusion, similar objects, small objects, scale variation, aspect ratio change, deformation and limited computational resources, efficient and accurate aerial tracking is still difficult to realize. In this work, we design a lightweight and efficient adaptive temporal contextual aggregation Siamese network for aerial tracking, which is designed with a parallel atrous module (PAM) and adaptive temporal context aggregation model (ATCAM) to mitigate the above problems. Firstly, by using a series of atrous convolutions with different dilation rates in parallel, the PAM can simultaneously extract and aggregate multi-scale features with spatial contextual information at the same feature map, which effectively improves the ability to cope with changes in target appearance caused by challenges such as aspect ratio change, occlusion, scale variation, etc. Secondly, the ATCAM adaptively introduces temporal contextual information to the target frame through the encoder-decoder structure, which helps the tracker resist interference and recognize the target when it is difficult to extract high-resolution features such as low-resolution, similar objects. Finally, experiments on the UAV20L, UAV123@10fps and DTB70 benchmarks demonstrate the impressive performance of the proposed network running at a high speed of over 75.5 fps on the NVIDIA 3060Ti.

Light Siamese Network for Long-Term Onboard Aerial Tracking

Light Siamese Network for Long-Term Onboard Aerial Tracking

Joint Learning Spatial-Temporal Attention Correlation Filters for Aerial Tracking

Joint Learning Spatial-Temporal Attention Correlation Filters for Aerial Tracking

SiamHOT: Siamese High-Order Transformer for Aerial Tracking

SiamHOT: Siamese High-Order Transformer for Aerial Tracking

SiamMAN: Siamese Multi-Phase Aware Network for Real-Time Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tracking

In this paper, we address aerial tracking tasks by designing multi-phase aware networks to obtain rich long-range dependencies. For aerial tracking tasks, the existing methods are prone to tracking drift in scenarios with high demand for multi-layer long-range feature dependencies such as viewpoint change caused by the characteristics of the UAV shooting perspective, low resolution, etc. In contrast to the previous works that only used multi-scale feature fusion to obtain contextual information, we designed a new architecture to adapt the characteristics of different levels of features in challenging scenarios to adaptively integrate regional features and the corresponding global dependencies information. Specifically, for the proposed tracker (SiamMAN), we first propose a two-stage aware neck (TAN), where first a cascaded splitting encoder (CSE) is used to obtain the distributed long-range relevance among the sub-branches by the splitting of feature channels, and then a multi-level contextual decoder (MCD) is used to achieve further global dependency fusion. Finally, we design the response map context encoder (RCE) utilizing long-range contextual information in backpropagation to accomplish pixel-level updating for the deeper features and better balance the semantic and spatial information. Several experiments on well-known tracking benchmarks illustrate that the proposed method outperforms SOTA trackers, which results from the effective utilization of the proposed multi-phase aware network for different levels of features.

Aerial tracking of camouflaged people in woodlands

Aerial tracking of camouflaged people in woodlands

Finite-time covert attacks on reference tracking systems with unknown-but-bounded noises

This paper investigates the finite-time stealthy covert attack (FTSCA) on the reference tracking systems (RTSs) with unknown-but-bounded (UBB) noises. It is assumed that the waypoints generated by the reference planner are transmitted to the plant via a wireless communication network which is vulnerable to cyber attacks. Under the proposed assumptions, a novel finite-time covert attack (FTCA) is designed such that the states can be steered into a desired target set during a finite-time interval while being undetectable. Note that UBB noises and all sets are characterized by zonotopes. Moreover, the design of FTSCA is transformed into solving the corresponding optimization problems. Finally, a quadrotor unmanned aerial tracking system is employed to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed main results.

SOCF: A correlation filter for real-time UAV tracking based on spatial disturbance suppression and object saliency-aware

The discriminative correlation filter (DCF) is commonly used in aerial object tracking due to its high tracking accuracy and computing speed. However, when similar object disturbances emerge in the background, the response map will generate sub-peaks, which may eventually lead to tracking failure. Meanwhile, the lack of attention to the tracked object can also cause tracking performance degradation. To these concerns, this paper proposes a novel correlation filter algorithm for real-time aerial tracking based on spatial disturbance suppression and object saliency-aware, i.e., SOCF. Firstly, this paper designs a novel spatial disturbance suppression strategy. Using the temporal information in the historical response maps, we construct a context response map, deviating it from the current response map to detect disturbance information in the background. Then, construct a spatial interference map, divide it into n×n non-overlapping regions, and suppress the negative samples in the disturbance region within the main regression. Furthermore, an object saliency-aware strategy is proposed, using a saliency detection algorithm to calculate the object-aware mask and multiplying it with the detection filter to obtain the object-aware filter. By constructing the object-aware regularization in the training phase, the trained detection filter focuses more on the object itself and can effectively separate the object from the background. Extensive experiments on four widely used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets demonstrate that the proposed SOCF tracker achieves high tracking performance. Meanwhile, our tracker can maintain real-time aerial tracking at 48 FPS on a single CPU.

Interframe Saliency Transformer and Lightweight Multidimensional Attention Network for Real-Time Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tracking

UAV visual-object-tracking technology based on Siamese neural networks has great scientific research and practical application value, and it is widely used in geological surveying, reconnaissance monitoring, and environmental monitoring. Due to the limited onboard computational resources and complex real-world environments of drones, most of the existing tracking systems based on Siamese neural networks struggle to combine excellent performance with high efficiency. Therefore, the key issue is to study how to improve the accuracy of target tracking under the challenges of real-time performance and the above factors. In response to this problem, this paper proposes a real-time UAV tracking system based on interframe saliency transformer and lightweight multidimensional attention network (SiamITL). Specifically, interframe saliency transformer is used to continuously perceive spatial and temporal information, making the network more closely related to the essence of the tracking task. Additionally, a lightweight multidimensional attention network is used to better capture changes in both target appearance and background information, improving the ability of the tracker to distinguish between the target and background. SiamITL is effective and efficient: extensive comparative experiments and ablation experiments have been conducted on multiple aerial tracking benchmarks, demonstrating that our algorithm can achieve more robust feature representation and more accurate target state estimation. Among them, SiamITL achieved success and accuracy rates of 0.625 and 0.818 in the UAV123 benchmark, respectively, demonstrating a certain level of leadership in this field. Furthermore, SiamITL demonstrates the potential for real-time operation on the embedded platform Xavier, highlighting its potential for practical application in real-world scenarios.

Global Multi-Scale Optimization and Prediction Head Attentional Siamese Network for Aerial Tracking

Siamese-based trackers have been widely used in object tracking. However, aerial remote tracking suffers from various challenges such as scale variation, viewpoint change, background clutter and occlusion, while most existing Siamese trackers are limited to single-scale and local features, making it difficult to achieve accurate aerial tracking. We propose the global multi-scale optimization and prediction head attentional Siamese network to solve this problem and improve aerial tracking performance. Firstly, a transformer-based multi-scale and global feature encoder (TMGFE) is proposed to obtain global multi-scale optimization of features. Then, the prediction head attentional module (PHAM) is proposed to add context information to the prediction head by adaptively adjusting the spatial position and channel contribution of the response map. Benefiting from these two components, the proposed tracker solves these challenges of aerial remote sensing tracking to some extent and improves tracking performance. Additionally, we conduct ablation experiments on aerial tracking benchmarks, including UAV123, UAV20L, UAV123@10fps and DTB70, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed network. The comparisons of our tracker with several state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers are also conducted on four benchmarks to verify its superior performance. It runs at 40.8 fps on the GPU RTX3060ti.

AMST2: aggregated multi-level spatial and temporal context-based transformer for robust aerial tracking

Recently, many existing visual trackers have made significant progress by incorporating either spatial information from multi-level convolution layers or temporal information for tracking. However, the complementary advantages of both spatial and temporal information cannot be leveraged when these two types of information are used separately. In this paper, we present a new approach for robust visual tracking using a transformer-based model that incorporates both spatial and temporal context information at multiple levels. To integrate the refined similarity maps through multi-level spatial and temporal encoders, we propose an aggregation encoder. Consequently, the output of the proposed aggregation encoder contains useful features that integrate the global contexts of multi-level spatial and the temporal contexts. The feature we propose offers a contrasting yet complementary representation of multi-level spatial and temporal contexts. This characteristic is particularly beneficial in complex aerial scenarios, where tracking failures can occur due to occlusion, motion blur, small objects, and scale variations. Also, our tracker utilizes a light-weight network backbone, ensuring fast and effective object tracking in aerial datasets. Additionally, the proposed architecture can achieve more robust object tracking against significant variations by updating the features of the latest object while retaining the initial template information. Extensive experiments on seven challenging short-term and long-term aerial tracking benchmarks have demonstrated that the proposed tracker outperforms state-of-the-art tracking methods in terms of both real-time processing speed and performance.

An unsupervised aerial tracking method of camouflaged targets in complex environments

With the widespread use of UAVs and the development of various technologies related to computer vision, much attention has been devoted to UAV-based target tracking. For the task of tracking camouflaged people in complex environments, there is a shortage of annotated datasets and poor backbone feature extraction network capabilities, which will cause tracking drift and tracking lag. To achieve unsupervised UAV target tracking under unsupervised conditions, a new target tracking model has been designed. First, we roughly detect moving targets using a camouflaged segmentation network, and then apply dynamic programming to generate smooth candidate boxes. Secondly, a deeper convolutional neural network is designed for feature extraction to replace the original backbone network, and the residual structure is modified to ensure tracking effectiveness. Extensive comparative experiments have shown that the proposed unsupervised method performs the task of UAV target tracking well.

BLE-based secure tracking system proposal

As communication capabilities of mobile devices continue to advance, ensuring reliability and security has become increasingly crucial. The aerial tracking system presented in this paper provides a useful solution for tracking and tracing objects in various scenarios. To ensure reliability and security, the system incorporates appropriate mechanisms, including Lightweight Cryptography, to prioritize confidentiality and integrity. The Android component of the system has two modes of operation: Tracker Mode, running on a smartphone mounted on a drone (RPA), and Client Mode, running on mobile devices on the ground. In Client Mode, users transmit their positioning and trajectory information via Bluetooth Low Energy beacon mode, which is then relayed to the server backend via the 4G/5G network once the RPA enters an area with coverage. The system provides a reliable and secure solution for situations where tracking and tracing are essential, such as the supervision and control of public areas with capacity control or tracking and localizing people in isolated environments.