# Multi-Modal Fusion for End-to-End RGB-T Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.11714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 63 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)
- [Visible-Thermal UAV Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04120/) (2022)
- [Object Tracking by Jointly Exploiting Frame and Event Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09052/) (2021)
- [Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15851/) (2023)
- [OneTracker: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Foundation Models and Efficient Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09634/) (2024)
- [Prompting for Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14571/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Multimodal Spatial-temporal Patterns for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15691/) (2024)
- [Bi-directional Adapter for Multi-modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10611/) (2023)
- [Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10761/) (2025)
- [SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16002/) (2024)
- [Generative-based Fusion Mechanism for Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01728/) (2023)
- [MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10433/) (2021)
- [Temporal Adaptive RGBT Tracking with Modality Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01244/) (2024)
- [Towards Universal Modal Tracking with Online Dense Temporal Token Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20177/) (2025)
- [Exploring Fusion Strategies for Accurate RGBT Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08673/) (2022)
- [Glass Segmentation with RGB-Thermal Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05453/) (2022)
- [Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Single- and Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14394/) (2023)
- [XTrack: Multimodal Training Boosts RGB-X Video Object Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17773/) (2024)
- [Modality-missing RGBT Tracking: Invertible Prompt Learning and High-quality Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16244/) (2023)
- [RGBT Tracking via All-layer Multimodal Interactions with Progressive Fusion Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08827/) (2024)
- [What You Have is What You Track: Adaptive and Robust Multimodal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05899/) (2025)
- [Cross-modulated Attention Transformer for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02222/) (2024)
- [MambaVT: Spatio-Temporal Contextual Modeling for robust RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07889/) (2024)
- [Transformer RGBT Tracking with Spatio-Temporal Multimodal Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01674/) (2024)
- [Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11586/) (2024)
- [CADTrack: Learning Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment for Robust RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17967/) (2025)
- [What Happened 3 Seconds Ago? Inferring the Past with Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13651/) (2023)
- [RGB-T Tracking via Multi-Modal Mutual Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16386/) (2023)
- [RGB-T Tracking Based on Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04264/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose an end-to-end tracking framework for fusing the RGB and TIR modalities in RGB-T tracking. Our baseline tracker is DiMP (Discriminative Model Prediction), which employs a carefully designed target prediction network trained end-to-end using a discriminative loss. We analyze the effectiveness of modality fusion in each of the main components in DiMP, i.e. feature extractor, target estimation network, and classifier. We consider several fusion mechanisms acting at different levels of the framework, including pixel-level, feature-level and response-level. Our tracker is trained in an end-to-end manner, enabling the components to learn how to fuse the information from both modalities. As data to train our model, we generate a large-scale RGB-T dataset by considering an annotated RGB tracking dataset (GOT-10k) and synthesizing paired TIR images using an image-to-image translation approach. We perform extensive experiments on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset and RGBT210 dataset, evaluating each type of modality fusing on each model component. The results show that the proposed fusion mechanisms improve the performance of the single modality counterparts. We obtain our best results when fusing at the feature-level on both the IoU-Net and the model predictor, obtaining an EAO score of 0.391 on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset. With this fusion mechanism we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on RGBT210 dataset.