Recent advancements in visual object tracking have markedly improved the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking, which is a critical component in real-world robotics applications. While the integration of hierarchical lightweight networks has become a prevalent strategy for enhancing efficiency in UAV tracking, it often results in a significant drop in network capacity, which further exacerbates challenges in UAV scenarios, such as frequent occlusions and extreme changes in viewing angles. To address these issues, we introduce a novel family of UAV trackers, termed CGTrack, which combines explicit and implicit techniques to expand network capacity within a coarse-to-fine framework. Specifically, we first introduce a Hierarchical Feature Cascade (HFC) module that leverages the spirit of feature reuse to increase network capacity by integrating the deep semantic cues with the rich spatial information, incurring minimal computational costs while enhancing feature representation. Based on this, we design a novel Lightweight Gated Center Head (LGCH) that utilizes gating mechanisms to decouple target-oriented coordinates from previously expanded features, which contain dense local discriminative information. Extensive experiments on three challenging UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that CGTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance while running fast. Code will be available at https://github.com/Nightwatch-Fox11/CGTrack.

Vision-Language MOT is a critical tracking problem that has recently garnered increasing attention. It aims to track objects based on human language commands, displacing the traditional use of templates or pre-set information from training sets in conventional tracking tasks. However, a key challenge remains in understanding why language is used for tracking, hindering further development. In this paper, we introduce Language-Guided MOT, a unified task framework, and LaMOT, a corresponding large-scale benchmark, which encompasses diverse scenarios and language descriptions and comprises 1,660 sequences from 4 different datasets. The purpose of LaMOT is to unify various Vision-Language MOT tasks while providing a standardized evaluation platform. To ensure high-quality annotations, we manually assign appropriate descriptive texts to each target in every video and conduct careful inspection and correction. To our knowledge, LaMOt is the first benchmark dedicated to Language-Guided MOT. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective tracker, termed LaMOTer. By establishing a unified task framework, providing challenging benchmarks, and offering insights for future algorithm design and evaluation, we expect to contribute to the advancement of research in Vision-Language MOT. We will release the data at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/LaMOT.

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these sequences are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and the most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrackBBfor generic object tracking from our PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrackBBmanifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrackBBis even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations are released at https://hengfan2010.github.io/projects/PlanarTrack/.

Visual tracking has achieved considerable progress in recent years. However, current research in the field mainly focuses on tracking of opaque objects, while little attention is paid to transparent object tracking. In this paper, we make the first attempt in exploring this problem by proposing a Transparent Object Tracking Benchmark (TOTB). Specifically, TOTB consists of 225 videos (86K frames) from 15 diverse transparent object categories. Each sequence is manually labeled with axis-aligned bounding boxes. To the best of our knowledge, TOTB is the first benchmark dedicated to transparent object tracking. In order to understand how existing trackers perform and to provide comparison for future research on TOTB, we extensively evaluate 25 state-of-the-art tracking algorithms. The evaluation results exhibit that more efforts are needed to improve transparent object tracking. Besides, we observe some nontrivial findings from the evaluation that are discrepant with some common beliefs in opaque object tracking. For example, we find that deeper features are not always good for improvements. Moreover, to encourage future research, we introduce a novel tracker, named TransATOM, which leverages transparency features for tracking and surpasses all 25 evaluated approaches by a large margin. By releasing TOTB, we expect to facilitate future research and application of transparent object tracking in both the academia and industry. The TOTB and evaluation results as well as TransATOM are available at https: //hengfan2010.github.io/projects/TOTB/.