# CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19434/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (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)
- [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)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation: A Unifying Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05050/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [A Unified Sequence Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07669/) (2022)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10802/) (2023)
- [Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16556/) (2021)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [NarrLV: Towards a Comprehensive Narrative-Centric Evaluation for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11245/) (2025)
- [CADTrack: Learning Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment for Robust RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17967/) (2025)
- [ATCTrack: Aligning Target-Context Cues with Dynamic Target States for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19875/) (2025)
- [RAGTrack: Language-aware RGBT Tracking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03617/) (2026)
- [Tracking and Segmenting Anything in Any Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19475/) (2025)
- [GOT-Edit: Geometry-Aware Generic Object Tracking via Online Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08550/) (2026)
- [Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking with Dual Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03716/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Train-Free Infinite-Frame Generation for Consistent Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18233/) (2026)
- [Optimizing Multi-Modality Trackers via Significance-Regularized Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17488/) (2025)
- [RGBX-R1: Visual Modality Chain-of-Thought Guided Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00504/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effectively modeling and utilizing spatiotemporal features from RGB and other modalities (eg, depth, thermal, and event data, denoted as X) is the core of RGB-X tracker design. Existing methods often employ two parallel branches to separately process the RGB and X input streams, requiring the model to simultaneously handle two dispersed feature spaces, which complicates both the model structure and computation process. More critically, intra-modality spatial modeling within each dispersed space incurs substantial computational overhead, limiting resources for inter-modality spatial modeling and temporal modeling. To address this, we propose a novel tracker, CSTrack, which focuses on modeling Compact Spatiotemporal features to achieve simple yet effective tracking. Specifically, we first introduce an innovative Spatial Compact Module that integrates the RGB-X dual input streams into a compact spatial feature, enabling thorough intra- and inter-modality spatial modeling. Additionally, we design an efficient Temporal Compact Module that compactly represents temporal features by constructing the refined target distribution heatmap. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our compact spatiotemporal modeling method, with CSTrack achieving new SOTA results on mainstream RGB-X benchmarks. The code and models will be released at: https://github.com/XiaokunFeng/CSTrack.