# DCPT: Darkness Clue-Prompted Tracking in Nighttime UAVs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10491/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [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 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)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Deep Back-Projection Networks For Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02735/) (2018)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Distractor-aware Siamese Networks for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06048/) (2018)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [SHIFT: A Synthetic Driving Dataset for Continuous Multi-Task Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08367/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [HiFT: Hierarchical Feature Transformer for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00202/) (2021)
- [Improving Visual Prompt Tuning for Self-supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05067/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Nighttime Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10541/) (2022)
- [Prompt Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08914/) (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)
- [Tracker Meets Night: A Transformer Enhancer for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10951/) (2023)

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

- [Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15851/) (2023)
- [Tracking Transforming Objects: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18143/) (2024)
- [DARTer: Dynamic Adaptive Representation Tracker for Nighttime UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00752/) (2025)
- [Low-Light Object Tracking: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11463/) (2024)
- [Camouflaged Object Tracking: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13877/) (2024)
- [UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles): Diverse Applications of UAV Datasets in Segmentation, Classification, Detection, and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03245/) (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)
- [Tracking Reflected Objects: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05235/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)

Existing nighttime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trackers follow an "Enhance-then-Track" architecture - first using a light enhancer to brighten the nighttime video, then employing a daytime tracker to locate the object. This separate enhancement and tracking fails to build an end-to-end trainable vision system. To address this, we propose a novel architecture called Darkness Clue-Prompted Tracking (DCPT) that achieves robust UAV tracking at night by efficiently learning to generate darkness clue prompts. Without a separate enhancer, DCPT directly encodes anti-dark capabilities into prompts using a darkness clue prompter (DCP). Specifically, DCP iteratively learns emphasizing and undermining projections for darkness clues. It then injects these learned visual prompts into a daytime tracker with fixed parameters across transformer layers. Moreover, a gated feature aggregation mechanism enables adaptive fusion between prompts and between prompts and the base model. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance for DCPT on multiple dark scenario benchmarks. The unified end-to-end learning of enhancement and tracking in DCPT enables a more trainable system. The darkness clue prompting efficiently injects anti-dark knowledge without extra modules. Code is available at https://github.com/bearyi26/DCPT.