Hybrid-Mode tracker with online SA-LSTM updater

The backbone network and target template are pivotal factors influencing the performance of Siamese trackers. However, traditional approaches encounter challenges in eliminating local redundancy and establishing global dependencies when learning visual data representations. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) are commonly employed as backbones in Siamese-based trackers, each primarily addresses only one of these challenges. Furthermore, tracking is a dynamic process. Nonetheless, in many Siamese trackers, solely a fixed initial template is employed to facilitate target state matching. This approach often proves inadequate for effectively handling scenes characterized by target deformation, occlusion, and fast motion. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid-Mode Siamese tracker featuring an online SA-LSTM updater. Distinct learning operators are tailored to exploit characteristics at different depth levels of the backbone, integrating convolution and transformers to form a Hybrid-Mode backbone. This backbone efficiently learns global dependencies among input tokens while minimizing redundant computations in local domains, enhancing feature richness for target tracking. The online SA-LSTM updater comprehensively integrates spatial–temporal context during tracking, producing dynamic template features with enhanced representations of target appearance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets, including GOT-10K, LaSOT, TrackingNet, OTB-100, UAV123, and NFS, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves outstanding performance, running at 35 FPS on a single GPU.