UAV Target Tracking Algorithm Based on Illumination Adaptation and Future Awareness in Low Illumination Scenes

Abstract

Aiming at problems such as tracking failure caused by illumination changes often encountered during unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking, a target tracking algorithm with illumination adaptive and future-aware correlation filters is proposed based on the background-aware correlation filters (BACF) algorithm, which realizes reliable UAV tracking tasks at night. First, the dark scene is recognized, and an efficient image enhancement module is used to enhance the brightness of low illumination images. Then a future-aware module is constructed to train the tracking model using the contextual information of the target in the next frame for better robustness. Finally, the model updating stage involves adaptive filter updating and adaptive learning rate updating to enhance target tracking precision. The results of the comparison experiments with the state-of-the-art algorithms on the UAVDark135, UAVDT, and DTB70 datasets show that the algorithm in this paper outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking methods and has better tracking performance under light changes and fast motion (FM) scenarios. The tracking speed on a single Central processing unit (CPU) reaches 49 FPS, which satisfies the real-time requirement of UAV tracking.