Explicit Visual Prompts for Visual Object Tracking
Liangtao Shi Bineng Zhong Qihua Liang Ning Li Shengping Zhang Xianxian Li
How to effectively exploit spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture
target appearance changes in visual tracking. However, most deep learning-based
trackers mainly focus on designing a complicated appearance model or template
updating strategy, while lacking the exploitation of context between
consecutive frames and thus entailing the \textit{when-and-how-to-update}
dilemma. To address these issues, we propose a novel explicit visual prompts
framework for visual tracking, dubbed \textbf{EVPTrack}. Specifically, we
utilize spatio-temporal tokens to propagate information between consecutive
frames without focusing on updating templates. As a result, we cannot only
alleviate the challenge of \textit{when-to-update}, but also avoid the
hyper-parameters associated with updating strategies. Then, we utilize the
spatio-temporal tokens to generate explicit visual prompts that facilitate
inference in the current frame. The prompts are fed into a transformer encoder
together with the image tokens without additional processing. Consequently, the
efficiency of our model is improved by avoiding \textit{how-to-update}. In
addition, we consider multi-scale information as explicit visual prompts,
providing multiscale template features to enhance the EVPTrack's ability to
handle target scale changes. Extensive experimental results on six benchmarks
(i.e., LaSOT, LaSOT\rm $_{ext}$, GOT-10k, UAV123, TrackingNet, and TNL2K.)
validate that our EVPTrack can achieve competitive performance at a real-time
speed by effectively exploiting both spatio-temporal and multi-scale
information. Code and models are available at
https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EVPTrack.