CVTrack: Combined Convolutional Neural Network and Vision Transformer Fusion Model for Visual Tracking

Most single-object trackers currently employ either a convolutional neural network (CNN) or a vision transformer as the backbone for object tracking. In CNNs, convolutional operations excel at extracting local features but struggle to capture global representations. On the other hand, vision transformers utilize cascaded self-attention modules to capture long-range feature dependencies but may overlook local feature details. To address these limitations, we propose a target-tracking algorithm called CVTrack, which leverages a parallel dual-branch backbone network combining CNN and Transformer for feature extraction and fusion. Firstly, CVTrack utilizes a parallel dual-branch feature extraction network with CNN and transformer branches to extract local and global features from the input image. Through bidirectional information interaction channels, the local features from the CNN branch and the global features from the transformer branch are able to interact and fuse information effectively. Secondly, deep cross-correlation operations and transformer-based methods are employed to fuse the template and search region features, enabling comprehensive interaction between them. Subsequently, the fused features are fed into the prediction module to accomplish the object-tracking task. Our tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets while maintaining real-time execution speed. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the efficacy of each module in the parallel dual-branch feature extraction backbone network.