CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features

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.

Enhancing Vision-Language Tracking by Effectively Converting Textual Cues into Visual Cues

Vision-Language Tracking (VLT) aims to localize a target in video sequences using a visual template and language description. While textual cues enhance tracking potential, current datasets typically contain much more image data than text, limiting the ability of VLT methods to align the two modalities effectively. To address this imbalance, we propose a novel plug-and-play method named CTVLT that leverages the strong text-image alignment capabilities of foundation grounding models. CTVLT converts textual cues into interpretable visual heatmaps, which are easier for trackers to process. Specifically, we design a textual cue mapping module that transforms textual cues into target distribution heatmaps, visually representing the location described by the text. Additionally, the heatmap guidance module fuses these heatmaps with the search image to guide tracking more effectively. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance and validating the utility of our method for enhanced VLT.