CTIFTrack: Continuous Temporal Information Fusion for object track

In visual tracking tasks, researchers usually focus on increasing the complexity of the model or only discretely focusing on the changes in the object itself to achieve accurate recognition and tracking of the moving object. However, they often overlook the significant contribution of video-level linear temporal information fusion and continuous spatiotemporal mapping to tracking tasks. This oversight may lead to poor tracking performance or insufficient real-time ability of the model in complex scenes. Therefore, this paper proposes a real-time tracker, namely Continuous Temporal Information Fusion Tracker (CTIFTrack). The key of CTIFTrack lies in its well-designed Temporal Information Fusion (TIF) module, which cleverly performs a linear fusion of the temporal information between the $\left(t\text{-}1\right)\text{-th}$ and the $t\text{-th}$ frames and completes the spatiotemporal mapping. This enables the tracker to better understand the overall spatiotemporal information and contextual spatiotemporal correlations within the video, thereby having a positive impact on the tracking task. In addition, this paper also proposes the Object Template Feature Refinement (OTFR) module, which effectively captures the global information and local details of the object, and further improves the tracker’s understanding of the object features. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven benchmarks, such as LaSOT, GOT-10K, UAV123, NFS, TrackingNet, VOT2018 and OTB-100. The experimental results validate the significant contribution of the TIF module and OTFR module to the tracking task, as well as the effectiveness of CTIFTrack. It is worth noting that while maintaining excellent tracking performance, CTIFTrack also shows outstanding real-time tracking speed. On the Nvidia Tesla T4-16GB GPU, the $FPS$ of CTIFTrack reaches 71.98. The code and demo materials will be available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/CTIFTrack.