TY - JOUR
T1 - Collaborative Spatiotemporal Anchors and Key Feature Enhancement for UAV Tracking
AU - Jin, Qiuyu
AU - Han, Yuqi
AU - Tang, Linbo
AU - Wang, Wenzheng
AU - Sun, Haotian
AU - Wang, Yanhua
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2008-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - 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 Second, the key feature enhancement module conducts attention-driven fusion of candidate regions and historical references, dynamically propagating spatially salient features - identified through attention response analysis - via a cascaded architecture to mitigate error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.
AB - 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.
KW - Attention mechanism
KW - Wasserstein distance
KW - spatiotemporal modeling
KW - uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105030096625
U2 - 10.1109/JSTARS.2026.3657803
DO - 10.1109/JSTARS.2026.3657803
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105030096625
SN - 1939-1404
VL - 19
SP - 5999
EP - 6012
JO - IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
JF - IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
ER -