SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Xiaojun Hou, Jiazheng Xing, Yijie Qian, Yaowei Guo, Shuo Xin, Junhao Chen, Kai Tang, Mengmeng Wang, Zhengkai Jiang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu

Multimodal Visual Object Tracking (VOT) has recently gained significant attention due to its robustness. Early research focused on fully fine-tuning RGB-based trackers which was inefficient and lacked generalized representation due to the scarcity of multimodal data. Therefore recent studies have utilized prompt tuning to transfer pre-trained RGB-based trackers to multimodal data. However the modality gap limits pre-trained knowledge recall and the dominance of the RGB modality persists preventing the full utilization of information from other modalities. To address these issues we propose a novel symmetric multimodal tracking framework called SDSTrack. We introduce lightweight adaptation for efficient fine-tuning which directly transfers the feature extraction ability from RGB to other domains with a small number of trainable parameters and integrates multimodal features in a balanced symmetric manner. Furthermore we design a complementary masked patch distillation strategy to enhance the robustness of trackers in complex environments such as extreme weather poor imaging and sensor failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDSTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multimodal tracking scenarios including RGB+Depth RGB+Thermal and RGB+Event tracking and exhibits impressive results in extreme conditions. Our source code is available at : https://github.com/hoqolo/SDSTrack.