# SCT-MOT: Enhancing Air-to-Air Multiple UAVs Tracking with Swarm-Coupled Motion and Trajectory Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06883/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [Multiple Object Tracking: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7618/) (2014)
- [Chained-Tracker: Chaining Paired Attentive Regression Results for End-to-End Joint Multiple-Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14557/) (2020)
- [EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10876/) (2023)
- [MANTRA: Memory Augmented Networks for Multiple Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03340/) (2020)
- [Hard to Track Objects with Irregular Motions and Similar Appearances? Make It Easier by Buffering the Matching Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14317/) (2022)
- [QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06984/) (2022)
- [GIAOTracker: A comprehensive framework for MCMOT with global information and optimizing strategies in VisDrone 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11983/) (2022)
- [Vision-based Anti-UAV Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10851/) (2022)
- [UCMCTrack: Multi-Object Tracking with Uniform Camera Motion Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08952/) (2023)
- [MOTRv3: Release-Fetch Supervision for End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14298/) (2023)
- [Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13074/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Uncertainty in Multi-Agent Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13947/) (2021)
- [Sea You Later: Metadata-Guided Long-Term Re-Identification for UAV-Based Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03561/) (2023)
- [BACTrack: Building Appearance Collection for Aerial Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06136/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EECTracker: Swarm Motion Prior-Guided Feature Compensation for Airborne Optical UAV Swarm Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15171/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Air-to-air tracking of swarm UAVs presents significant challenges due to the complex nonlinear group motion and weak visual cues for small objects, which often cause detection failures, trajectory fragmentation, and identity switches. Although existing methods have attempted to improve performance by incorporating trajectory prediction, they model each object independently, neglecting the swarm-level motion dependencies. Their limited integration between motion prediction and appearance representation also weakens the spatio-temporal consistency required for tracking in visually ambiguous and cluttered environments, making it difficult to maintain coherent trajectories and reliable associations. To address these challenges, we propose SCT-MOT, a tracking framework that integrates Swarm-Coupled motion modeling and Trajectory-guided feature fusion. First, we develop a Swarm Motion-Aware Trajectory Prediction (SMTP) module jointly models historical trajectories and posture-aware appearance features from a swarm-level perspective, enabling more accurate forecasting of the nonlinear, coupled group trajectories. Second, we design a Trajectory-Guided Spatio-Temporal Feature Fusion (TG-STFF) module aligns predicted positions with historical visual cues and deeply integrates them with current frame features, enhancing temporal consistency and spatial discriminability for weak objects. Extensive experiments on three public air-to-air swarm UAV tracking datasets, including AIRMOT, MOT-FLY, and UAVSwarm, demonstrate that SMTP achieves more accurate trajectory forecasts and yields a 1.21% IDF1 improvement over the state-of-the-art trajectory prediction module EqMotion when integrated into the same MOT framework. Overall, our SCT-MOT consistently achieves superior accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art trackers across multiple metrics under complex swarm scenarios.