Local Perception-Aware Transformer for Aerial Tracking

Published in IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022), 2022

Transformer-based visual object tracking has been utilized extensively. However, the Transformer structure is lack of enough inductive bias. In addition, only focusing on encoding the global feature does harm to modeling local details, which restricts the capability of tracking in aerial robots. Specifically, with local-modeling to global-search mechanism, the proposed tracker replaces the global encoder by a novel local-recognition encoder. In the employed encoder, a local-recognition attention and a local element correction network are carefully designed for reducing the global redundant information interference and increasing local inductive bias. Meanwhile, the latter can model local object details precisely under aerial view through detail-inquiry net. The proposed method achieves competitive accuracy and robustness in several authoritative aerial benchmarks with 316 sequences in total. The proposed tracker’s practicability and efficiency have been validated by the real-world tests.