Architecture and evaluation protocol for transformer-based visual object tracking in UAV applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Borne, Augustin, Notin, Pierre, Hennequin, Christophe, Changey, Sebastien, Bazeille, Stephane, Cudel, Christophe, Quint, Franz
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Borne, Augustin
Notin, Pierre
Hennequin, Christophe
Changey, Sebastien
Bazeille, Stephane
Cudel, Christophe
Quint, Franz
author_facet Borne, Augustin
Notin, Pierre
Hennequin, Christophe
Changey, Sebastien
Bazeille, Stephane
Cudel, Christophe
Quint, Franz
contents Object tracking from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is challenged by platform dynamics, camera motion, and limited onboard resources. Existing visual trackers either lack robustness in complex scenarios or are too computationally demanding for real-time embedded use. We propose an Modular Asynchronous Tracking Architecture (MATA) that combines a transformer-based tracker with an Extended Kalman Filter, integrating ego-motion compensation from sparse optical flow and an object trajectory model. We further introduce a hardware-independent, embedded oriented evaluation protocol and a new metric called Normalized time to Failure (NT2F) to quantify how long a tracker can sustain a tracking sequence without external help. Experiments on UAV benchmarks, including an augmented UAV123 dataset with synthetic occlusions, show consistent improvements in Success and NT2F metrics across multiple tracking processing frequency. A ROS 2 implementation on a Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin confirms that the evaluation protocol more closely matches real-time performance on embedded systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03904
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Architecture and evaluation protocol for transformer-based visual object tracking in UAV applications
Borne, Augustin
Notin, Pierre
Hennequin, Christophe
Changey, Sebastien
Bazeille, Stephane
Cudel, Christophe
Quint, Franz
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Object tracking from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is challenged by platform dynamics, camera motion, and limited onboard resources. Existing visual trackers either lack robustness in complex scenarios or are too computationally demanding for real-time embedded use. We propose an Modular Asynchronous Tracking Architecture (MATA) that combines a transformer-based tracker with an Extended Kalman Filter, integrating ego-motion compensation from sparse optical flow and an object trajectory model. We further introduce a hardware-independent, embedded oriented evaluation protocol and a new metric called Normalized time to Failure (NT2F) to quantify how long a tracker can sustain a tracking sequence without external help. Experiments on UAV benchmarks, including an augmented UAV123 dataset with synthetic occlusions, show consistent improvements in Success and NT2F metrics across multiple tracking processing frequency. A ROS 2 implementation on a Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin confirms that the evaluation protocol more closely matches real-time performance on embedded systems.
title Architecture and evaluation protocol for transformer-based visual object tracking in UAV applications
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03904