Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lu, Andong, Zhao, Jiacong, Li, Chenglong, Xiao, Yun, Luo, Bin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lu, Andong
Zhao, Jiacong
Li, Chenglong
Xiao, Yun
Luo, Bin
author_facet Lu, Andong
Zhao, Jiacong
Li, Chenglong
Xiao, Yun
Luo, Bin
contents Modality gap between RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) images is a crucial issue but often overlooked in existing RGBT tracking methods. It can be observed that modality gap mainly lies in the image style difference. In this work, we propose a novel Coupled Knowledge Distillation framework called CKD, which pursues common styles of different modalities to break modality gap, for high performance RGBT tracking. In particular, we introduce two student networks and employ the style distillation loss to make their style features consistent as much as possible. Through alleviating the style difference of two student networks, we can break modality gap of different modalities well. However, the distillation of style features might harm to the content representations of two modalities in student networks. To handle this issue, we take original RGB and TIR networks as the teachers, and distill their content knowledge into two student networks respectively by the style-content orthogonal feature decoupling scheme. We couple the above two distillation processes in an online optimization framework to form new feature representations of RGB and thermal modalities without modality gap. In addition, we design a masked modeling strategy and a multi-modal candidate token elimination strategy into CKD to improve tracking robustness and efficiency respectively. Extensive experiments on five standard RGBT tracking datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods while achieving the fastest tracking speed of 96.4 FPS. Code available at https://github.com/Multi-Modality-Tracking/CKD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation
Lu, Andong
Zhao, Jiacong
Li, Chenglong
Xiao, Yun
Luo, Bin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Modality gap between RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) images is a crucial issue but often overlooked in existing RGBT tracking methods. It can be observed that modality gap mainly lies in the image style difference. In this work, we propose a novel Coupled Knowledge Distillation framework called CKD, which pursues common styles of different modalities to break modality gap, for high performance RGBT tracking. In particular, we introduce two student networks and employ the style distillation loss to make their style features consistent as much as possible. Through alleviating the style difference of two student networks, we can break modality gap of different modalities well. However, the distillation of style features might harm to the content representations of two modalities in student networks. To handle this issue, we take original RGB and TIR networks as the teachers, and distill their content knowledge into two student networks respectively by the style-content orthogonal feature decoupling scheme. We couple the above two distillation processes in an online optimization framework to form new feature representations of RGB and thermal modalities without modality gap. In addition, we design a masked modeling strategy and a multi-modal candidate token elimination strategy into CKD to improve tracking robustness and efficiency respectively. Extensive experiments on five standard RGBT tracking datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods while achieving the fastest tracking speed of 96.4 FPS. Code available at https://github.com/Multi-Modality-Tracking/CKD.
title Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11586