# LiteTrack: Layer Pruning with Asynchronous Feature Extraction for Lightweight and Efficient Visual Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deeper and Wider Siamese Networks for Real-Time Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01660/) (2019)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Two-stream Beats One-stream: Asymmetric Siamese Network for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00516/) (2025)
- [Exploring Dynamic Transformer for Efficient Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17651/) (2024)
- [RGB-Sonar Tracking Benchmark and Spatial Cross-Attention Transformer Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07189/) (2024)
- [FARTrack: Fast Autoregressive Visual Tracking with High Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03214/) (2026)
- [UETrack: A Unified and Efficient Framework for Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01412/) (2026)
- [Learning Motion Blur Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05383/) (2024)
- [Learning an Adaptive and View-Invariant Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20002/) (2024)
- [LightFC-X: Lightweight Convolutional Tracker for RGB-X Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18143/) (2025)
- [TrackingMiM: Efficient Mamba-in-Mamba Serialization for Real-time UAV Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01535/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Semantic-Aware Correlation Modeling for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21351/) (2025)
- [Layer-Guided UAV Tracking: Enhancing Efficiency and Occlusion Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13636/) (2026)
- [DPTrack:Directional Kernel-Guided Prompt Learning for Robust Nighttime Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15449/) (2025)
- [Dual-branch Distilled Transformer for Efficient Asymmetric UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28018/) (2026)
- [Towards Compact Unified Multimodal Tracking: Synergizing Knowledge Distillation with Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01488/) (2026)
- [MaST: Motion-aware Sparse Pipeline for Lightweight Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24365/) (2026)
- [LoopTrack: A Simple Baseline for Parameter-Efficient Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent advancements in transformer-based visual trackers have led to significant progress, attributed to their strong modeling capabilities. However, as performance improves, running latency correspondingly increases, presenting a challenge for real-time robotics applications, especially on edge devices with computational constraints. In response to this, we introduce LiteTrack, an efficient transformer-based tracking model optimized for high-speed operations across various devices. It achieves a more favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency than the other lightweight trackers. The main innovations of LiteTrack encompass: 1) asynchronous feature extraction and interaction between the template and search region for better feature fushion and cutting redundant computation, and 2) pruning encoder layers from a heavy tracker to refine the balnace between performance and speed. As an example, our fastest variant, LiteTrack-B4, achieves 65.2% AO on the GOT-10k benchmark, surpassing all preceding efficient trackers, while running over 100 fps with ONNX on the Jetson Orin NX edge device. Moreover, our LiteTrack-B9 reaches competitive 72.2% AO on GOT-10k and 82.4% AUC on TrackingNet, and operates at 171 fps on an NVIDIA 2080Ti GPU. The code and demo materials will be available at https://github.com/TsingWei/LiteTrack.