Adaptive and Background-Aware Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking

While discriminative correlation filters (DCF)-based trackers prevail in UAV tracking for their favorable efficiency, lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN)based trackers using filter pruning have also demonstrated remarkable efficiency and precision. However, the use of pure vision transformer models (ViTs) for UAV tracking remains unexplored, which is a surprising finding given that ViTs have been shown to produce better performance and greater efficiency than CNNs in image classification. In this paper, we propose an efficient ViT-based tracking framework, Aba-ViTrack, for UAV tracking. In our framework, feature learning and template-search coupling are integrated into an efficient one-stream ViT to avoid an extra heavy relation modeling module. The proposed Aba-ViT exploits an adaptive and background-aware token computation method to reduce inference time. This approach adaptively discards tokens based on learned halting probabilities, which a priori are higher for background tokens than target ones. Extensive experiments on six UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed Aba-ViTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance in UAV tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/ xyyang317/Aba-ViTrack .