How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline
This addresses a safety and privacy issue in applications like airport inspection by introducing a challenging new tracking task, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Anti-UAV technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking adversarial UAVs from a moving UAV platform, a gap in Anti-UAV research, by proposing a new UAV-Anti-UAV task and constructing a million-scale dataset with 1,810 videos, showing that modern trackers have significant room for improvement in this domain.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer wide-ranging applications but also pose significant safety and privacy violation risks in areas like airport and infrastructure inspection, spurring the rapid development of Anti-UAV technologies in recent years. However, current Anti-UAV research primarily focuses on RGB, infrared (IR), or RGB-IR videos captured by fixed ground cameras, with little attention to tracking target UAVs from another moving UAV platform. To fill this gap, we propose a new multi-modal visual tracking task termed UAV-Anti-UAV, which involves a pursuer UAV tracking a target adversarial UAV in the video stream. Compared to existing Anti-UAV tasks, UAV-Anti-UAV is more challenging due to severe dual-dynamic disturbances caused by the rapid motion of both the capturing platform and the target. To advance research in this domain, we construct a million-scale dataset consisting of 1,810 videos, each manually annotated with bounding boxes, a language prompt, and 15 tracking attributes. Furthermore, we propose MambaSTS, a Mamba-based baseline method for UAV-Anti-UAV tracking, which enables integrated spatial-temporal-semantic learning. Specifically, we employ Mamba and Transformer models to learn global semantic and spatial features, respectively, and leverage the state space model's strength in long-sequence modeling to establish video-level long-term context via a temporal token propagation mechanism. We conduct experiments on the UAV-Anti-UAV dataset to validate the effectiveness of our method. A thorough experimental evaluation of 50 modern deep tracking algorithms demonstrates that there is still significant room for improvement in the UAV-Anti-UAV domain. The dataset and codes will be available at {\color{magenta}https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}.