Continuity-Aware Latent Interframe Information Mining for Reliable UAV Tracking

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is crucial for autonomous navigation and has broad applications in robotic automation fields. However, reliable UAV tracking remains a challenging task due to various difficulties like frequent occlusion and aspect ratio change. Additionally, most of the existing work mainly focuses on explicit information to improve tracking performance, ignoring potential interframe connections. To address the above issues, this work proposes a novel framework with continuity-aware latent interframe information mining for reliable UAV tracking, i.e., ClimRT. Specifically, a new efficient continuity-aware latent interframe information mining network (ClimNet) is proposed for UAV tracking, which can generate highly-effective latent frame between two adjacent frames. Besides, a novel location-continuity Transformer (LCT) is designed to fully explore continuity-aware spatial-temporal information, thereby markedly enhancing UAV tracking. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on three authoritative aerial benchmarks strongly validate the robustness and reliability of ClimRT in UAV tracking performance. Furthermore, real-world tests on the aerial platform validate its practicability and effectiveness. The code and demo materials are released at https://github.com/vision4robotics/ClimRT.