High-Performance Discriminative Tracking with Transformers

End-to-end discriminative trackers improve the state of the art significantly, yet the improvement in robustness and efficiency is restricted by the conventional discriminative model, i.e., least-squares based regression. In this paper, we present DTT, a novel single-object discriminative tracker, based on an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. By self- and encoder-decoder attention mechanisms, our approach is able to exploit the rich scene information in an end-to-end manner, effectively removing the need for hand-designed discriminative models. In online tracking, given a new test frame, dense prediction is performed at all spatial positions. Not only location, but also bounding box of the target object is obtained in a robust fashion, streamlining the discriminative tracking pipeline. DTT is conceptually simple and easy to implement. It yields state-of-the-art performance on four popular benchmarks including GOT-10k, LaSOT, NfS, and TrackingNet while running at over 50 FPS, confirming its effectiveness and efficiency. We hope DTT may provide a new perspective for single-object visual tracking.