Edge-Aware Thermal Infrared UAV Swarm Tracking

Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is challenging because the target is often small, low-contrast, and easily confused with thermal distractors or cluttered backgrounds. Recent Transformer-based trackers have achieved promising performance by learning strong appearance representations, but their responses can still be dominated by background structures when the target appearance is weak or ambiguous. A natural solution is to introduce temporal motion cues. However, in infrared UAV tracking, motion cues are not always reliable: camera jitter, dynamic backgrounds, sensor noise, and target disappearance may produce temporal variations that are stronger than the true target motion. Therefore, the key challenge is not simply how to use motion, but how to distinguish target-consistent motion from background-induced pseudo motion. To this end, we propose CMRTrack, a counterfactual motion reliability learning framework for robust infrared UAV tracking. CMRTrack first extracts temporal evidence from adjacent search regions using a lightweight motion evidence encoder. During training, a counterfactual target-erased history branch is introduced to construct hard motion references, encouraging the motion encoder to learn reliable target-consistent motion rather than arbitrary temporal changes. The learned motion evidence is then incorporated into a one-stream tracking framework through motion-guided token modulation and reliability-aware score fusion, enabling adaptive feature enhancement and response refinement. Extensive experiments on Anti-UAV410 demonstrate that CMRTrack consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-art trackers and significantly improves the OSTrack baseline, with ablation studies and qualitative analysis verifying the effectiveness of the proposed counterfactual motion reliability learning.

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

Airborne optical tracking of uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms is challenging due to extremely small target scales, rapid viewpoint changes, and cluttered backgrounds, which can weaken target feature responses and lead to intermittent or temporarily missing detector responses. Existing multi-object tracking methods generally depend on reliable target-specific detector responses to maintain target states and identities across frames. When such responses become unreliable, target states cannot be reliably updated and cross-frame association cues become ambiguous, resulting in fragmented trajectories and identity switches. To address this problem, we propose EECTracker, a swarm-motion-prior-guided joint detection-and-tracking framework for airborne optical UAV swarm tracking. EECTracker constructs a probabilistic swarm motion prior from reliable historical tracklets to capture the shared short-term image-plane motion tendency of the swarm and its uncertainty, providing spatial guidance for cross-frame feature compensation. Building on this prior, we introduce Energy--Entropy Consistency Activation (EEC Activation) to evaluate motion-prior-conditioned feature consistency using feature residual energy and local residual entropy. The resulting Local EEC score guides pixel-level feature compensation by enhancing motion-prior-consistent feature responses in potential target regions while suppressing inconsistent background responses. Experiments on AIRMOT and UAVSwarm show that EECTracker achieves superior overall tracking performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the strongest competing method SCT-MOT, EECTracker improves MOTA/IDF1 by 3.89/1.79 percentage points on AIRMOT and by 2.81/1.74 percentage points on UAVSwarm, while maintaining online inference speed.