# CST Anti-UAV: A Thermal Infrared Benchmark for Tiny UAV Tracking in Complex Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23473/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [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)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16556/) (2021)
- [SwinTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00995/) (2021)
- [Know Your Surroundings: Exploiting Scene Information for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11014/) (2020)
- [Backbone is All Your Need: A Simplified Architecture for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05328/) (2022)
- [Transforming Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11192/) (2022)
- [YouTube-BoundingBoxes: A Large High-Precision Human-Annotated Data Set for Object Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00824/) (2017)
- [Deformable Siamese Attention Networks for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06711/) (2020)
- [Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16580/) (2023)
- [STMTrack: Template-free Visual Tracking with Space-time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00324/) (2021)
- [Alpha-Refine: Boosting Tracking Performance by Precise Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02024/) (2020)
- [Robust Object Modeling for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05140/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Queries for Adaptive Tracking with Spatio-TemporalTransformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10574/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Evaluating the Robustness of Anti-UAV Detection under Controlled Fog Degradation: Fog-Aware Training and Clear-Sky Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00141/) (2026)
- [UAV-CB: A Complex-Background RGB-T Dataset and Local Frequency Bridge Network for UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17492/) (2026)
- [LER-YOLO: Reliability-Aware Expert Routing for Misaligned RGB-Infrared UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20667/) (2026)
- [SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18747/) (2026)
- [AnyTrack: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06773/) (2026)
- [GSO-Net: Visual State Machines for Hazardous Freight Transfer Compliance at Petrochemical Logistics Nodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12408/) (2026)
- [Catastrophic Forgetting in Sequential Thermal Anti-UAV Detection: The Role of Scale-Conditioned Gradient Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08315/) (2026)
- [The Gap Is in the Geometry: A Convergent Meta-Analysis of Multi-Facet Aerial and Remote Sensing Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has raised serious public safety and privacy concerns, making UAV perception crucial for anti-UAV tasks. However, existing UAV tracking datasets predominantly feature conspicuous objects and lack diversity in scene complexity and attribute representation, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we present the CST Anti-UAV, a new thermal infrared dataset specifically designed for Single Object Tracking (SOT) in Complex Scenes with Tiny UAVs (CST). It contains 220 video sequences with over 240k high-quality bounding box annotations, highlighting two key properties: a significant number of tiny-sized UAV targets and the diverse and complex scenes. To the best of our knowledge, CST Anti-UAV is the first dataset to incorporate complete manual frame-level attribute annotations, enabling precise evaluations under varied challenges. To conduct an in-depth performance analysis for CST Anti-UAV, we evaluate 20 existing SOT methods on the proposed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that tracking tiny UAVs in complex environments remains a challenge, as the state-of-the-art method achieves only 35.92% state accuracy, much lower than the 67.69% observed on the Anti-UAV410 dataset. These findings underscore the limitations of existing benchmarks and the need for further advancements in UAV tracking research. The CST Anti-UAV benchmark is about to be publicly released, which not only fosters the development of more robust SOT methods but also drives innovation in anti-UAV systems.