UncTrack: Reliable Visual Object Tracking With Uncertainty-Aware Prototype Memory Network

Transformer-based trackers have achieved promising success and become the dominant tracking paradigm because of their accuracy and efficiency. Despite the substantial progress, most of the existing approaches handle object tracking as a deterministic coordinate regression problem, while the target localization uncertainty has been largely overlooked, which hampers trackers' ability to maintain reliable target state prediction in challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we propose UncTrack, a novel uncertainty-aware transformer-based tracker that predicts the target localization uncertainty and incorporates this uncertainty information for accurate target state inference. Specifically, UncTrack uses a transformer encoder to perform feature interactions between the template and search images. The output features are passed into an uncertainty-aware localization decoder (ULD) to coarsely predict the corner-based localization and the corresponding localization uncertainty. Then, the localization uncertainty is sent into a prototype memory network (PMN) to excavate valuable historical information to identify whether the target state prediction is reliable. To enhance the template representation, the samples with high confidence are fed back into the prototype memory bank for memory updating, which makes the tracker more robust to challenging appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ManOfStory/UncTrack.