# SAM-DA: UAV Tracks Anything at Night with SAM-Powered Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (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)
- [Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation: A Unifying Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05050/) (2018)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12306/) (2023)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00860/) (2021)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (2020)
- [RSPrompter: Learning to Prompt for Remote Sensing Instance Segmentation based on Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16269/) (2023)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Deeper and Wider Siamese Networks for Real-Time Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01660/) (2019)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [YouTube-BoundingBoxes: A Large High-Precision Human-Annotated Data Set for Object Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00824/) (2017)
- [Can SAM Segment Anything? When SAM Meets Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04709/) (2023)
- [DANNet: A One-Stage Domain Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10834/) (2021)
- [Learning the Model Update for Siamese Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00855/) (2019)
- [HiFT: Hierarchical Feature Transformer for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00202/) (2021)
- [Graph Attention Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11204/) (2020)
- [TCTrack: Temporal Contexts for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01885/) (2022)
- [AutoTrack: Towards High-Performance Visual Tracking for UAV with Automatic Spatio-Temporal Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12949/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [Progressive Representation Learning for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16652/) (2024)
- [Prompt-Driven Temporal Domain Adaptation for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18533/) (2024)
- [Segment Anything for Videos: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08315/) (2024)
- [Underwater Camouflaged Object Tracking Meets Vision-Language SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16902/) (2024)
- [Evaluating SAM2 for Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01774/) (2025)
- [Mutual-Learning Knowledge Distillation for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07884/) (2023)
- [SSTD: Stripe-Like Space Target Detection Using Single-Point Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18097/) (2024)
- [Low-Light Object Tracking: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11463/) (2024)
- [MambaNUT: Nighttime UAV Tracking via Mamba-based Adaptive Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00626/) (2024)
- [UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00648/) (2025)
- [DaDiff: Domain-aware Diffusion Model for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12270/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Dual Prompt-Driven Feature Encoding for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19628/) (2026)
- [SFDATrack: Generalized Source-Free Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00369/) (2026)
- [Template-Search Domain Adaptation via Multi-Stage Feature Alignment for Cross-Modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38637/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptation (DA) has demonstrated significant promise for real-time nighttime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) DA still lacks the potential object with accurate pixel-level location and boundary to generate the high-quality target domain training sample. This key issue constrains the transfer learning of the real-time daytime SOTA trackers for challenging nighttime UAV tracking. Recently, the notable Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved a remarkable zero-shot generalization ability to discover abundant potential objects due to its huge data-driven training approach. To solve the aforementioned issue, this work proposes a novel SAM-powered DA framework for real-time nighttime UAV tracking, i.e., SAM-DA. Specifically, an innovative SAM-powered target domain training sample swelling is designed to determine enormous high-quality target domain training samples from every single raw nighttime image. This novel one-to-many generation significantly expands the high-quality target domain training sample for DA. Comprehensive experiments on extensive nighttime UAV videos prove the robustness and domain adaptability of SAM-DA for nighttime UAV tracking. Especially, compared to the SOTA DA, SAM-DA can achieve better performance with fewer raw nighttime images, i.e., the fewer-better training. This economized training approach facilitates the quick validation and deployment of algorithms for UAVs. The code is available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/SAM-DA.