Collaborative Spatiotemporal Anchors and Key Feature Enhancement for UAV Tracking

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Target tracking in uncrewed aerial vehicle platforms faces significant challenges due to high maneuverability-induced appearance variations, including abrupt scale changes, viewpoint shifts, and nonrigid deformations. Existing trackers suffer from two critical limitations: fixed-interval sampling strategies fail to capture nonlinear state transitions, and error accumulation in dynamic reference updating degrades long-term robustness. To address these issues, we propose a novel dynamic spatiotemporal perception framework with error suppression. Our approach introduces two core innovations. First, the spatiotemporal anchors module employs the Wasserstein-1 distance to quantify feature distribution evolution, enabling geodesic-equidistant sampling of representative reference frames that uniformly cover target transition trajectories. This distribution-aware mechanism adaptively balances update density during stable phases and critical transitions. Second, the key feature enhancement module conducts attention-driven fusion of candidate regions and historical references, dynamically propagating spatially salient features - identified through attention response analysis - via a cascaded architecture to mitigate error accumulation. Extensive evaluations on UAV123, UAVTrack112 L, DTB70, and LaSOT benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with notable improvements in occlusion scenarios and deformation resistance, confirming its practical viability for aerial observation systems.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5999-6012
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Volume19
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2026

Keywords

  • Attention mechanism
  • Wasserstein distance
  • spatiotemporal modeling
  • uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking

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