HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts
Authors: Wenrui Cai, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang

Trackers that follow Siamese paradigm utilize similarity matching between template and search region features for tracking. Many methods have been explored to enhance tracking performance by incorporating tracking history to better handle scenarios involving target appearance variations such as deformation and occlusion. However the utilization of historical information in existing methods is insufficient and incomprehensive which typically requires repetitive training and introduces a large amount of computation. In this paper we show that by providing a tracker that follows Siamese paradigm with precise and updated historical information a significant performance improvement can be achieved with completely unchanged parameters. Based on this we propose a historical prompt network that uses refined historical foreground masks and historical visual features of the target to provide comprehensive and precise prompts for the tracker. We build a novel tracker called HIPTrack based on the historical prompt network which achieves considerable performance improvements without the need to retrain the entire model. We conduct experiments on seven datasets and experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art trackers on LaSOT LaSOText GOT-10k and NfS. Furthermore the historical prompt network can seamlessly integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing trackers providing performance enhancements. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/HIPTrack.