# Transformer Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 412 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation: A Unifying Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05050/) (2018)
- [ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09224/) (2016)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (2020)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Siam R-CNN: Visual Tracking by Re-Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12836/) (2019)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [Need for Speed: A Benchmark for Higher Frame Rate Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05884/) (2017)
- [End-to-end ASR: from Supervised to Semi-Supervised Learning with Modern Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08460/) (2019)
- [Know Your Surroundings: Exploiting Scene Information for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11014/) (2020)
- [Deformable Siamese Attention Networks for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06711/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 412)

- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [SPViT: Enabling Faster Vision Transformers via Soft Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13890/) (2021)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16556/) (2021)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [SwinTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00995/) (2021)
- [MPViT: Multi-Path Vision Transformer for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11010/) (2021)
- [Backbone is All Your Need: A Simplified Architecture for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05328/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [Transforming Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11192/) (2022)
- [Beyond Self-attention: External Attention using Two Linear Layers for Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02358/) (2021)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [Towards Grand Unification of Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07078/) (2022)
- [Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16580/) (2023)
- [Visible-Thermal UAV Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04120/) (2022)
- [Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08354/) (2022)
- [Robust Object Modeling for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05140/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Correlation acts as a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion manner to consider the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation itself is a local linear matching process, leading to lose semantic information and fall into local optimum easily, which may be the bottleneck of designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. Is there any better feature fusion method than correlation? To address this issue, inspired by Transformer, this work presents a novel attention-based feature fusion network, which effectively combines the template and search region features solely using attention. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. Finally, we present a Transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression head. Experiments show that our TransT achieves very promising results on six challenging datasets, especially on large-scale LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10k benchmarks. Our tracker runs at approximatively 50 fps on GPU. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT.