# Target-aware Bidirectional Fusion Transformer for Aerial Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09951/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (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)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (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)
- [Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02680/) (2022)
- [LightTrack: Finding Lightweight Neural Networks for Object Tracking via One-Shot Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14545/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Learning Background-Aware Correlation Filters for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04590/) (2017)
- [Exploring Lightweight Hierarchical Vision Transformers for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06904/) (2023)
- [Efficient Visual Tracking with Exemplar Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09686/) (2021)
- [Learning Aberrance Repressed Correlation Filters for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02231/) (2019)
- [SiamAPN++: Siamese Attentional Aggregation Network for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08816/) (2021)
- [Bi-LRFusion: Bi-Directional LiDAR-Radar Fusion for 3D Dynamic Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01438/) (2023)
- [SGDViT: Saliency-Guided Dynamic Vision Transformer for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04378/) (2023)
- [Siamese Transformer Pyramid Networks for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08822/) (2021)
- [Progressive Representation Learning for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16652/) (2024)
- [Self-aligned Spatial Feature Extraction Network for UAV Vehicle Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02836/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The trackers based on lightweight neural networks have achieved great success in the field of aerial remote sensing, most of which aggregate multi-stage deep features to lift the tracking quality. However, existing algorithms usually only generate single-stage fusion features for state decision, which ignore that diverse kinds of features are required for identifying and locating the object, limiting the robustness and precision of tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel target-aware Bidirectional Fusion transformer (BFTrans) for UAV tracking. Specifically, we first present a two-stream fusion network based on linear self and cross attentions, which can combine the shallow and the deep features from both forward and backward directions, providing the adjusted local details for location and global semantics for recognition. Besides, a target-aware positional encoding strategy is designed for the above fusion model, which is helpful to perceive the object-related attributes during the fusion phase. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated on several popular UAV benchmarks, including UAV-123, UAV20L and UAVTrack112. Massive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can exceed other state-of-the-art trackers and run with an average speed of 30.5 FPS on embedded platform, which is appropriate for practical drone deployments.