Organizations: Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, China · Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-Source Information Mining and Security, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, China · Nanjing University of Science and Technology · Xi’an Research Institute of High Technology, Xi’an 710025, China
Abstract
Given the real-time demands of UAV tracking, many methods simplify the backbone to reduce computation, but this often weakens feature representation and degrades performance in complex scenarios. To alleviate this issue, we propose EATrack, an efficient and asymmetric UAV tracking framework centered around a teacher-guided dual-branch distillation strategy that enhances the feature expressiveness of the lightweight student model. Specifically, EATrack investigates two complementary perspectives of knowledge transfer: spatially focused feature-level distillation that compensates for weakened representations by guiding the student to learn strong target representations, and prediction-level distillation that enhances spatial localization by learning the teacher's capability for accurate target localization. Furthermore, to enhance robustness against appearance variations, we introduce a fine-grained target-aware distillation strategy that selectively transfers the teacher's target modeling capacity to the student. A temporal adaptation module is incorporated at inference to enhance robustness over time. Experiments on five UAV benchmarks demonstrate that EATrack achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and speed. Code: https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EATrack
UAV Anti-UAV tracking is an emerging low-altitude security task for localizing an adversarial UAV using the onboard camera of a moving observer UAV. It differs from conventional UAV tracking and ground-based Anti-UAV tracking because both the camera platform and the target move simultaneously. This dual-dynamic setting induces rapid viewpoint changes, motion blur, scale variation, and visually similar distractors, making reliable appearance matching difficult. Under such rapidly changing conditions, fixed visual representations are often insufficient because target appearance becomes unreliable and feature distributions may deviate from the training domain. The target language description remains stable across frames and can therefore serve as a semantic anchor for temporal state propagation, while online feature-distribution alignment can reduce video-specific test-time shifts. In this paper, we propose \emph{SATATrack}, a Semantic-Aware Temporal Adaptation framework for UAV Anti-UAV tracking. SATATrack introduces Semantic-Aware Context Propagation (SACP), which uses the target description to guide temporal context propagation across backbone stages and preserve target identity under rapid appearance changes. An auxiliary contrastive regularizer is used during training to discourage responses to semantically similar background regions. During inference, Temporal-Aware Distribution Alignment (TADA) aligns feature distributions online without updating model parameters, combining recent-frame estimates with training-time statistics for stability. SATATrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UAV-Anti-UAV benchmark while remaining competitive in Anti-UAV and UAV object tracking tasks. The code will be available at https://github.com/XiaozhenQiao/SATATrack.
Event cameras offer microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range for low-altitude UAV perception. However, long-range UAVs often produce sparse, fragmented, and noise-contaminated event responses, where one semantic target may appear as multiple spatially separated blobs. Direct blob-level asynchronous tracking therefore suffers from duplicate trajectories and unstable identities. We propose ASUMOT, a motion-consistency-based asynchronous UAV detection and tracking framework operating directly on raw events. ASUMOT models each UAV as a set of motion-consistent event blobs. A local motion-consistency estimator triggers reliable candidates, a lightweight multi-task verifier provides UAV confidence and motion-direction cues, and motion-consistency clustering aggregates fragmented blobs into identity-consistent UAV tracks. We also introduce ES-UAV, a high-definition event-level UAV benchmark with dense semantic annotations. Experiments on public UAV tracking data and ES-UAV show that ASUMOT improves the accuracy--efficiency trade-off while preserving asynchronous event processing. Code and Dataset will be released.
UAV-ground visual tracking (UGVT) aims to simultaneously track the same object from both the UAV and the ground view. However, existing two-stream methods suffer from isolated feature extraction and rely heavily on implicit appearance matching, which struggles to establish reliable correspondence under drastic view differences, leading to tracking unreliability. To address these limitations, we propose VL-UniTrack, a fully unified framework enhanced by visual-language prompts. By encoding features from both views within a single shared encoder, our method breaks the barrier of feature isolation to facilitate sufficient cross-view interaction. To overcome the ambiguity caused by relying solely on appearance matching, we design visual-language geometric prompting module, which fuses language descriptions with visual features to generate learnable prompts. These prompts are then fed into our prompt-guided cross-view adapter module to enable sufficient cross-view feature interaction and to guide the learning of view-specific feature representations. Furthermore, a confidence-modulated mutual distillation loss is proposed to regularize the training by mitigating noise propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark. The code can be downloaded in https://github.com/xuboyue1999/VL-UniTrack.git