Abstract
Most previous progress in object tracking is realized in daytime scenes with favorable illumination. State-of-the-arts can hardly carry on their superiority at night so far, thereby considerably blocking the broadening of visual tracking-related unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. To realize reliable UAV tracking at night, a spatial-channel Transformer-based low-light enhancer (namely SCT), which is trained in a novel task-inspired manner, is proposed and plugged prior to tracking approaches. To achieve semantic-level low-light enhancement targeting the high-level task, the novel spatial-channel attention module is proposed to model global information while preserving local context. In the enhancement process, SCT denoises and illuminates nighttime images simultaneously through a robust non-linear curve projection. Moreover, to provide a comprehensive evaluation, we construct a challenging nighttime tracking benchmark, namely DarkTrack2021, which contains 110 challenging sequences with over 100 K frames in total. Evaluations on both the public UAVDark135 benchmark and the newly constructed DarkTrack2021 benchmark show that the task-inspired design enables SCT with significant performance gains for nighttime UAV tracking compared with other top-ranked low-light enhancers. Real-world tests on a typical UAV platform further verify the practicability of the proposed approach. The DarkTrack2021 benchmark and the code of the proposed approach are publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
大多数先前在物体跟踪方面的进展都是在白天光线良好的场景中实现的。目前,最先进的技术很难在夜晚做出显著优势,因此极大地限制了与视觉跟踪相关的无人机应用的发展。为了实现可靠的无人机夜间跟踪,我们提出了一种基于空间通道Transformer的低光增强器(称为SCT),该增强器采用一种新的任务启发式方法进行训练。为了针对高级别任务实现语义层面的低光增强,我们提出了一种新的空间通道注意力模块,同时保留局部上下文信息。在增强过程中,SCT通过一种稳健的非线性曲线投影方式同时降噪和照明夜间图像。此外,为了进行全面评估,我们建立了一个具有挑战性的夜间跟踪基准,即DarkTrack2021,该基准包含超过100 K帧的110个挑战性序列。在公开的UAVDark135基准和新建的DarkTrack2021基准上进行了评估,结果表明,任务启发式设计使SCT在夜晚无人机跟踪方面比其他顶级低光增强器表现出显著的性能增益。针对典型的无人机平台的实际测试进一步验证了所提出的方法的可行性。DarkTrack2021基准和所提出的方法代码在此httpsURL上公开可用。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10951
