Visual Object Tracking with Multi-Frame Distractor Suppression

With the rapid development of CNN or Transformer, the present mainstream approaches regard an image patch as the reference of the target to perform tracking, which is known as template matching-based trackers. However, most existing template matching-based trackers only consider the per-frame localization accuracy, neglecting the potential distractor (similar object) dependencies among multiple video frames, which poses a fundamental challenge in template matching-based tracking. In this work, we propose a novel comprehensive framework with multi-frame distractor suppression for visual object tracking (MFDSTrack), which explicitly models the temporal history of both the target object and potential distractors. Specifically, we utilize a universal target candidate generation module to detect target candidates (both target and distractors), providing a holistic view of the scene. In addition, a temporal and distractor-aware association module is designed to suppress multi-frame distractors by adopting a simple encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. The encoder accepts inputs of target candidates' history, while the decoder takes current target candidate queries and the output of the encoder as inputs to associate current target candidate queries with historical trajectories. We extensively evaluate our trackers, MFDSTrack-SD, MFDSTrack-OS, MFDSTrack-GRM, and MFDSTrack-LT on the LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, UAV123, NFS, and OTB100 benchmark. Extensive experiments show that our methods outperform previous state-of-the-art trackers on seven tracking benchmarks.