Infrared UAV Target Tracking with Dynamic Feature Refinement and Global Contextual Attention Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fang, Houzhang, Wu, Chenxing, Bai, Kun, Chen, Tianqi, Wang, Xiaolin, Liu, Xiyang, Chang, Yi, Yan, Luxin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Fang, Houzhang
Wu, Chenxing
Bai, Kun
Chen, Tianqi
Wang, Xiaolin
Liu, Xiyang
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
author_facet Fang, Houzhang
Wu, Chenxing
Bai, Kun
Chen, Tianqi
Wang, Xiaolin
Liu, Xiyang
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
contents Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target tracking based on thermal infrared imaging has been one of the most important sensing technologies in anti-UAV applications. However, the infrared UAV targets often exhibit weak features and complex backgrounds, posing significant challenges to accurate tracking. To address these problems, we introduce SiamDFF, a novel dynamic feature fusion Siamese network that integrates feature enhancement and global contextual attention knowledge distillation for infrared UAV target (IRUT) tracking. The SiamDFF incorporates a selective target enhancement network (STEN), a dynamic spatial feature aggregation module (DSFAM), and a dynamic channel feature aggregation module (DCFAM). The STEN employs intensity-aware multi-head cross-attention to adaptively enhance important regions for both template and search branches. The DSFAM enhances multi-scale UAV target features by integrating local details with global features, utilizing spatial attention guidance within the search frame. The DCFAM effectively integrates the mixed template generated from STEN in the template branch and original template, avoiding excessive background interference with the template and thereby enhancing the emphasis on UAV target region features within the search frame. Furthermore, to enhance the feature extraction capabilities of the network for IRUT without adding extra computational burden, we propose a novel tracking-specific target-aware contextual attention knowledge distiller. It transfers the target prior from the teacher network to the student model, significantly improving the student network's focus on informative regions at each hierarchical level of the backbone network. Extensive experiments on real infrared UAV datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art target trackers under complex backgrounds while achieving a real-time tracking speed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Infrared UAV Target Tracking with Dynamic Feature Refinement and Global Contextual Attention Knowledge Distillation
Fang, Houzhang
Wu, Chenxing
Bai, Kun
Chen, Tianqi
Wang, Xiaolin
Liu, Xiyang
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target tracking based on thermal infrared imaging has been one of the most important sensing technologies in anti-UAV applications. However, the infrared UAV targets often exhibit weak features and complex backgrounds, posing significant challenges to accurate tracking. To address these problems, we introduce SiamDFF, a novel dynamic feature fusion Siamese network that integrates feature enhancement and global contextual attention knowledge distillation for infrared UAV target (IRUT) tracking. The SiamDFF incorporates a selective target enhancement network (STEN), a dynamic spatial feature aggregation module (DSFAM), and a dynamic channel feature aggregation module (DCFAM). The STEN employs intensity-aware multi-head cross-attention to adaptively enhance important regions for both template and search branches. The DSFAM enhances multi-scale UAV target features by integrating local details with global features, utilizing spatial attention guidance within the search frame. The DCFAM effectively integrates the mixed template generated from STEN in the template branch and original template, avoiding excessive background interference with the template and thereby enhancing the emphasis on UAV target region features within the search frame. Furthermore, to enhance the feature extraction capabilities of the network for IRUT without adding extra computational burden, we propose a novel tracking-specific target-aware contextual attention knowledge distiller. It transfers the target prior from the teacher network to the student model, significantly improving the student network's focus on informative regions at each hierarchical level of the backbone network. Extensive experiments on real infrared UAV datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art target trackers under complex backgrounds while achieving a real-time tracking speed.
title Infrared UAV Target Tracking with Dynamic Feature Refinement and Global Contextual Attention Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04581