Learning Multidimensional Spatial Attention for Robust Nighttime Visual Tracking

Abstract

The recent development of advanced trackers, which use nighttime image enhancement technology, has led to marked advances in the performance of visual tracking at night. However, the images recovered by currently available enhancement methods still have some weaknesses, such as blurred target details and obvious image noise. To this end, we propose a novel method for learning multidimensional spatial attention for robust nighttime visual tracking, which is developed over a spatial channel transformer based low light enhancer (SCT), named MSA-SCT. First, a novel multidimensional spatial attention (MSA) is designed. Additional reliable feature responses are generated by aggregating channel and multi-scale spatial information, thus making the model more adaptable to illumination conditions and noise levels in different regions of the image. Second, with optimized skip connections, the effects of redundant information and noise can be limited, which is more useful for the propagation of fine detail features in nighttime images from low to high level features and improves the enhancement effect. Finally, the tracker with enhancers was tested on multiple tracking benchmarks to fully demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MSA-SCT.