Real-Time RGBT Target Tracking Based on Attention Mechanism

The fusion tracking of RGB and thermal infrared image (RGBT) has attracted widespread interest within target tracking by leveraging the complementing benefits of information from both visible and thermal infrared modalities, but achieving robustness while operating in real time remains a challenge. Aimed at this problem, this paper proposes a real-time tracking network based on the attention mechanism, which can improve the tracking speed with a smaller model, and at the same time, introduce the attention mechanism in the module to strengthen the attention to the important features, which can guarantee a certain tracking accuracy. Specifically, the modal features of visible and thermal infrared are extracted separately by using the backbone of the dual-stream structure; then, the important features in the two modes are selected and enhanced by using the channel attention mechanism in the feature selection enhancement module (FSEM) and the Transformer, while noise is reduced by using gating circuits. Finally, the final enhancement fusion is performed by using the spatial channel adaptive adjustment fusion module (SCAAM) in both the spatial and channel dimensions. The PR/SR of the proposed algorithm tested on the GTOT, RGBT234 and LasHeR datasets are 90.0%/73.0%, 84.4%/60.2%, and 46.8%/34.3%, respectively, and generally good tracking accuracy has been achieved, with a speed of up to 32.3067 fps, meeting the model’s real-time requirement.