# HighlightNet: Highlighting Low-Light Potential Features for Real-Time UAV Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09224/) (2016)
- [LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03995/) (2015)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [HiFT: Hierarchical Feature Transformer for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00202/) (2021)
- [TCTrack: Temporal Contexts for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01885/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Nighttime Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10541/) (2022)
- [SiamAPN++: Siamese Attentional Aggregation Network for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08816/) (2021)
- [All-Day Object Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08446/) (2021)
- [DarkLighter: Light Up the Darkness for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14389/) (2021)
- [Mutation Sensitive Correlation Filter for Real-Time UAV Tracking with Adaptive Hybrid Label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08073/) (2021)
- [Ad2Attack: Adaptive Adversarial Attack on Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01516/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10772/) (2022)
- [SAM-DA: UAV Tracks Anything at Night with SAM-Powered Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01024/) (2023)
- [DCPT: Darkness Clue-Prompted Tracking in Nighttime UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10491/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Object Tracking in Low-Light Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16250/) (2023)
- [DARTer: Dynamic Adaptive Representation Tracker for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00752/) (2025)
- [Mutual-Learning Knowledge Distillation for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07884/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Object Tracking: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11463/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Nighttime UAV Tracking with Light Distribution Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16631/) (2024)
- [UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00648/) (2025)
- [Towards Accurate UAV Image Perception: Guiding Vision-Language Models with Stronger Task Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07302/) (2025)
- [DPTrack:Directional Kernel-Guided Prompt Learning for Robust Nighttime Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15449/) (2025)
- [MATrack: Efficient Multiscale Adaptive Tracker for Real-Time Nighttime UAV Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21586/) (2025)
- [TAE: Target-aware enhancer for nighttime UAV tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29558/) (2026)
- [SFDATrack: Generalized Source-Free Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00369/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light environments have posed a formidable challenge for robust unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking even with state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers since the potential image features are hard to extract under adverse light conditions. Besides, due to the low visibility, accurate online selection of the object also becomes extremely difficult for human monitors to initialize UAV tracking in ground control stations. To solve these problems, this work proposes a novel enhancer, i.e., HighlightNet, to light up potential objects for both human operators and UAV trackers. By employing Transformer, HighlightNet can adjust enhancement parameters according to global features and is thus adaptive for the illumination variation. Pixel-level range mask is introduced to make HighlightNet more focused on the enhancement of the tracking object and regions without light sources. Furthermore, a soft truncation mechanism is built to prevent background noise from being mistaken for crucial features. Evaluations on image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate HighlightNet has advantages in facilitating human perception. Experiments on the public UAVDark135 benchmark show that HightlightNet is more suitable for UAV tracking tasks than other SOTA low-light enhancers. In addition, real-world tests on a typical UAV platform verify HightlightNet's practicability and efficiency in nighttime aerial tracking-related applications. The code and demo videos are available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/HighlightNet.