Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking
Authors: name: You Wu; name: Xucheng Wang; name: Xiangyang Yang; name: Mengyuan Liu; name: Dan Zeng; name: Hengzhou Ye; name: Shuiwang Li
Published: 2025-04-12 14:06:50

Abstract: Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show
great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent
occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback:
these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New
methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT
models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust
Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance
of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking
operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking
approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs
that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed
ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an
Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more
compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model
ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed
ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher
efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the
effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance.
Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.