SiamCTCA: Cross-Temporal Correlation Aggregation Siamese Network for UAV Tracking

Abstract

In aerial target-tracking research, complex scenarios place extremely high demands on the precision and robustness of tracking algorithms. Although the existing target-tracking algorithms have achieved good performance in general scenarios, all of them ignore the correlation between contextual information to a certain extent, and the manipulation between features exacerbates the loss of information, leading to the degradation of precision and robustness, especially in the field of UAV target tracking. In response to this, we propose a new lightweight Siamese-based tracker, SiamCTCA. Its innovative cross-temporal aggregated strategy and three feature correlation fusion networks play a key role, in which the Transformer multistage embedding achieves cross-branch information fusion with the help of the intertemporal correlation interactive vision Transformer modules to efficiently integrate different levels of features, and the feed-forward residual multidimensional fusion edge mechanism reduces information loss by introducing residuals to cope with dynamic changes in the search region; and the response significance filter aggregation network suppresses the shallow noise amplification problem of neural networks. The modules are confirmed to be effective after ablation and comparison experiments, indicating that the tracker exhibits excellent tracking performance, and with faster tracking speeds than other trackers, these can be better deployed in the field of a UAV as a platform.