Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wu, You, Wang, Xucheng, Yang, Xiangyang, Liu, Mengyuan, Zeng, Dan, Ye, Hengzhou, Li, Shuiwang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wu, You
Wang, Xucheng
Yang, Xiangyang
Liu, Mengyuan
Zeng, Dan
Ye, Hengzhou
Li, Shuiwang
author_facet Wu, You
Wang, Xucheng
Yang, Xiangyang
Liu, Mengyuan
Zeng, Dan
Ye, Hengzhou
Li, Shuiwang
contents Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09228
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking
Wu, You
Wang, Xucheng
Yang, Xiangyang
Liu, Mengyuan
Zeng, Dan
Ye, Hengzhou
Li, Shuiwang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.
title Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09228