# Challenge-Aware RGBT Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.13143 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13143/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [OneTracker: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Foundation Models and Efficient Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09634/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Single- and Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14394/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Siamese Infrared and Visible Light Fusion Network for RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07302/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19434/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Fusion Network for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07662/) (2021)
- [RGB-T Tracking via Multi-Modal Mutual Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16386/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Object Tracking via Modality-Aware Fusion Network and A Large-Scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14446/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Object Tracking: Modality-Aware Representations and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04264/) (2021)
- [RGB-T Tracking Based on Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04264/) (2023)
- [AFter: Attention-based Fusion Router for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02717/) (2024)
- [Temporal Aggregation for Adaptive RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08949/) (2022)
- [A Survey for Deep RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09296/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RGB and thermal source data suffer from both shared and specific challenges, and how to explore and exploit them plays a critical role to represent the target appearance in RGBT tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel challenge-aware neural network to handle the modality-shared challenges (e.g., fast motion, scale variation and occlusion) and the modality-specific ones (e.g., illumination variation and thermal crossover) for RGBT tracking. In particular, we design several parameter-shared branches in each layer to model the target appearance under the modality-shared challenges, and several parameterindependent branches under the modality-specific ones. Based on the observation that the modality-specific cues of different modalities usually contains the complementary advantages, we propose a guidance module to transfer discriminative features from one modality to another one, which could enhance the discriminative ability of some weak modality. Moreover, all branches are aggregated together in an adaptive manner and parallel embedded in the backbone network to efficiently form more discriminative target representations. These challenge-aware branches are able to model the target appearance under certain challenges so that the target representations can be learnt by a few parameters even in the situation of insufficient training data. From the experimental results we will show that our method operates at a real-time speed while performing well against the state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets.
