ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper
Dynamic Compact Consensus Tracking for Aerial Robots
- Xiaolou Sun
- Zhibin Quan
- Feng Zhang
- Yuntian Li
- Chunyan Wang
- Wufei Si
- Wenhui Ni
- Runwei Guan
Existing one-stream trackers have attracted widespread attention. However, they are not applicable in real-time aerial robot tracking systems due to substantial computational overhead, especially when dynamic templates are introduced. To address this issue, we propose a novel Dynamic Compact Consensus Tracker (DC 2 T), constructed by stacking blocks that each consists of a Compact Token Encoder (CTE) and Dynamic Consensus Attention (DCA). Unlike traditional methods that convert images into a large number of tokens, the CTE, inspired by “superpixel”, extracts a compact set of representative tokens from both initial and dynamic templates, eliminating the need for a large token set. This strategic reduction in the number of compact tokens markedly decreases the computational load of CTE, enhancing the efficiency of subsequent attention operations. To achieve linear complexity of the DCA, compact dynamic template tokens (as keys) are requeried by search tokens (as queries) to perform dynamic consensus on the aggregated tokens (as values). This arrangement seamlessly incorporates dynamic spatio-temporal features into the DCA while avoiding the computational burden typically associated with dynamic templates. With the aim of further enhancing the system's responsiveness and accuracy, a direct control network is crafted to seamlessly incorporate the prediction of high-level control values into the tracking network, ensuring a cohesive and efficient interaction with the controller. Comprehensive experiments and real-world evaluations have proven DC 2 T's superior performance, accompanied by a significant reduction in FLOPs. Furthermore, we have conducted experiments that demonstrate the tracker's ability to integrate seamlessly with other technologies such as SLAM and detection, enabling precise tracking of arbitrary objects. The tracker code will be released in the github.com/xiaolousun/refine-pytracking.