Template update is essential for improving the adaptability of tracking algorithms to target appearance variations. While previous methods have leveraged the spatio-temporal complementarity of multi-modal templates for RGBT tracking, a comprehensive analysis of the template update mechanism remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel prototype-based framework that decomposes the multi-modal template update process from the perspective of prototype learning into four key components: multi-modal prototype, prototype integration, prototype evaluation, and prototype update algorithm. Our findings highlight that the multi-modal prototype is the most critical factor in enhancing tracking adaptability to appearance variations, leading to more robust target representations. While prototype integration is less crucial when the target representation is already robust, it still contributes to learning a more discriminative representation. Additionally, the accuracy of template updates is strongly influenced by prototype evaluation, which controls the accuracy of the update process. Finally, the prototype update algorithm, which determines when and how template updates occur, is key to maintaining tracking robustness. Building on these insights, we introduce the Multi-modal Prototype RGBT Tracker (MPTrack), which adapts dynamically to appearance variations through prototype learning. MPTrack combines a fixed template from the first frame with both modality-shared and modality-specific templates, forming a robust multi-modal prototype representation. It incorporates a prototype evaluation module that guides updates based on template reliability, and an adaptive update algorithm to manage templates effectively. Additionally, a prototype-guided cross-modal integration module enhances the discriminative power of multi-modal relation modeling. Experimental results on five challenging RGBT tracking benchmarks demonstrate that MPTrack consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, setting new performance records. The experimental data and source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/mmic-lcl/Datasets-and-benchmark-code.

Existing datasets for RGB-DVS tracking are collected with DVS346 camera and their resolution ($346 \times 260$) is low for practical applications. Actually, only visible cameras are deployed in many practical systems, and the newly designed neuromorphic cameras may have different resolutions. The latest neuromorphic sensors can output high-definition event streams, but it is very difficult to achieve strict alignment between events and frames on both spatial and temporal views. Therefore, how to achieve accurate tracking with unaligned neuromorphic and visible sensors is a valuable but unresearched problem. In this work, we formally propose the task of object tracking using unaligned neuromorphic and visible cameras. We build the first unaligned frame-event dataset CRSOT collected with a specially built data acquisition system, which contains 1,030 high-definition RGB-Event video pairs, 304,974 video frames. In addition, we propose a novel unaligned object tracking framework that can realize robust tracking even using the loosely aligned RGB-Event data. This proposed method utilizes uncertainty perception techniques, which can effectively reduce the negative impact of noise (especially noise in event data) on tracking performance. Specifically, we extract the template and search regions of RGB and Event data and feed them into a unified ViT backbone for feature embedding. Next, we propose uncertainty perception modules to encode the RGB and Event features, respectively, then, we propose a modality uncertainty fusion module to aggregate the two modalities. These three branches are jointly optimized in the training phase. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our tracker can collaborate the dual modalities for high-performance tracking even without strictly temporal and spatial alignment.

Existing Transformer-based RGB-Thermal (RGBT) tracking methods either use cross-attention to fuse the two modalities, or use self-attention and cross-attention to model both modality-specific and modality-sharing information. However, the significant appearance gap between modalities limits the feature representation ability of certain modalities during the fusion process. To address this problem, we propose a novel Progressive Fusion Transformer called ProFormer, which progressively integrates single-modality information into the multimodal representation for robust RGBT tracking. In particular, ProFormer first uses a self-attention module to collaboratively extract the multimodal representation. Then, ProFormer introduces two cross-attention modules to interact it with the features of the dual modalities for enhancing modality-specific information in the multimodal representation. In addition, we propose a dynamically guided learning algorithm that adaptively employs the well-performing branches to guide the learning of other branches, to improve the representation ability of each branch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ProFormer achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on RGBT210, RGBT234, LasHeR, and VTUAV datasets.

Remote sensing object tracking has gained significant attention due to its wide range of applications including surveillance and motion analysis. However, it faces various challenges such as low resolution, low contrast, blurring, and occlusion, which impede its development at a significantly slower pace compared to object tracking methods for general scenes. The challenges of low resolution, low contrast, and blurring result in weak target features, while the occlusion challenge poses a problem for target search range and tracker discrimination in subsequent frames. To address these issues, we propose a novel long-term motion-assisted framework, which can effectively mine long-term motion information and use an evaluation scheme for robust remote sensing object tracking. Specifically, we design a long-term motion feature mining module (LMFM), which efficiently calculates the long-term motion information by integrating previous motion features in a temporal-iterative manner to alleviate the problem of weak features caused by low resolution, low contrast, and blurring. Moreover, we design an evaluation scheme that combines the motion trajectory model, target classification scores, and predicted target positions to handle the issue of massive occlusion or target loss. Extensive experiments on the SatSOT, SV248S, and VISO datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers. The source code, trained models, and raw results are released athttps://github.com/zhaoxingle/LMANet.

Tiny objects, frequently appearing in practical applications, have weak appearance and features, and receive increasing interests in many vision tasks, such as object detection and segmentation. To promote the research and development of tiny object tracking, we create a large-scale video dataset, which contains 434 sequences with a total of more than 217K frames. Each frame is carefully annotated with a high-quality bounding box. In data creation, we take 12 challenge attributes into account to cover a broad range of viewpoints and scene complexities, and annotate these attributes for facilitating the attribute-based performance analysis. To provide a strong baseline in tiny object tracking, we propose a novel multilevel knowledge distillation network (MKDNet), which pursues three-level knowledge distillations in a unified framework to effectively enhance the feature representation, discrimination, and localization abilities in tracking tiny objects. Extensive experiments are performed on the proposed dataset, and the results prove the superiority and effectiveness of MKDNet compared with state-of-the-art methods. The dataset, the algorithm code, and the evaluation code are available at https://github.com/mmic-lcl/Datasets-and-benchmark-code.

In recent years, RGBT tracking has become a hot topic in the field of visual tracking, and made great progress. In this paper, we propose a novel Trident Fusion Network (TFNet) to achieve effective fusion of different modalities for robust RGBT tracking. In specific, to deploy the complementarity of features of all convolutional layers, we propose a recursive strategy to densely aggregate these features that yield robust representations of target objects in two modalities. Moreover, we design a trident architecture to integrate the fused features and both modality-specific features for robust target representations. There are three main advantages. First, retaining the classification layer of each modality is beneficial to enhance feature learning of single modality, and compared with aggregate branches, single-modality branches pay more attention to the mining of modal specific information. Second, when some modality is noisy or invalid, the modality-specific branches would capture more discriminative features for RGBT tracking. Finally, the integration of aggregation branches and single-modality branches is beneficial to the complementary learning of different modalities. In addition, we also introduce a feature pruning module in each branch to prune the redundant features and avoid network overfitting. Experimental results on four RGBT tracking benchmark datasets suggest that our tracker achieves superior performance against the state-of-the-art RGBT tracking methods.

RGB-Thermal object tracking attempts to locate target object using complementary visual and thermal infrared data. Existing RGB-T trackers fuse different modalities by robust feature representation learning or adaptive modal weighting. However, how to integrate dual attention mechanism for visual tracking is still a subject that has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose two visual attention mechanisms for robust RGB-T object tracking. Specifically, the local attention is implemented by exploiting the common visual attention of RGB and thermal data to train deep classifiers. We also introduce the global attention, which is a multimodal target-driven attention estimation network. It can provide global proposals for the classifier together with local proposals extracted from previous tracking result. Extensive experiments on two RGB-T benchmark datasets validated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

How to perform effective information fusion of different modalities is a core factor in boosting the performance of RGBT tracking. This paper presents a novel deep fusion algorithm based on the representations from an end-to-end trained convolutional neural network. To deploy the complementarity of features of all layers, we propose a recursive strategy to densely aggregate these features that yield robust representations of target objects in each modality. In different modalities, we propose to prune the densely aggregated features of all modalities in a collaborative way. In a specific, we employ the operations of global average pooling and weighted random selection to perform channel scoring and selection, which could remove redundant and noisy features to achieve more robust feature representation. Experimental results on two RGBT tracking benchmark datasets suggest that our tracker achieves clear state-of-the-art against other RGB and RGBT tracking methods.