Online contextual reasoning and association across consecutive video frames are critical to perceive instances in visual tracking. However, most current top-performing trackers persistently lean on sparse temporal relationships between reference and search frames via an offline mode. Consequently, they can only interact independently within each image-pair and establish limited temporal correlations. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a simple, flexible and effective video-level tracking pipeline, named ODTrack, which densely associates the contextual relationships of video frames in an online token propagation manner. ODTrack receives video frames of arbitrary length to capture the spatio-temporal trajectory relationships of an instance, and compresses the discrimination features (localization information) of a target into a token sequence to achieve frame-to-frame association. This new solution brings the following benefits: 1) the purified token sequences can serve as prompts for the inference in the next video frame, whereby past information is leveraged to guide future inference; 2) the complex online update strategies are effectively avoided by the iterative propagation of token sequences, and thus we can achieve more efficient model representation and computation. ODTrack achieves a new SOTA performance on seven benchmarks, while running at real-time speed. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/ODTrack.

How to make a good trade-off between performance and computational cost is crucial for a tracker. However, current famous methods typically focus on complicated and time-consuming learning that combining temporal and appearance information by input more and more images (or features). Consequently, these methods not only increase the model's computational source and learning burden but also introduce much useless and potentially interfering information. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple yet robust tracker that separates temporal information learning from appearance modeling and extracts temporal relations from a set of representative tokens rather than several images (or features). Specifically, we introduce one track token for each frame to collect the target's appearance information in the backbone. Then, we design a mamba-based Temporal Module for track tokens to be aware of context by interacting with other track tokens within a sliding window. This module consists of a mamba layer with autoregressive characteristic and a cross-attention layer with strong global perception ability, ensuring sufficient interaction for track tokens to perceive the appearance changes and movement trends of the target. Finally, track tokens serve as a guidance to adjust the appearance feature for the final prediction in the head. Experiments show our method is effective and achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmarks at a real-time speed.

Effectively constructing context information with long-term dependencies from video sequences is crucial for object tracking. However, the context length constructed by existing work is limited, only considering object information from adjacent frames or video clips, leading to insufficient utilization of contextual information. To address this issue, we propose MambaLCT, which constructs and utilizes target variation cues from the first frame to the current frame for robust tracking. First, a novel unidirectional Context Mamba module is designed to scan frame features along the temporal dimension, gathering target change cues throughout the entire sequence. Specifically, target-related information in frame features is compressed into a hidden state space through a selective scanning mechanism. The target information across the entire video is continuously aggregated into target variation cues. Next, we inject the target change cues into the attention mechanism, providing temporal information for modeling the relationship between the template and search frames. The advantage of MambaLCT is its ability to continuously extend the length of the context, capturing complete target change cues, which enhances the stability and robustness of the tracker. Extensive experiments show that long-term context information enhances the model's ability to perceive targets in complex scenarios. MambaLCT achieves new SOTA performance on six benchmarks while maintaining real-time runing speeds.

Ship License Plate Recognition (SLPR) technology serves as a fundamental technological foundation for maritime transportation management. Automated ship identification enhances both regulatory oversight and operational efficiency. However, current recognition models demonstrate significant limitations, including their inability to detect objects in complex environments and challenges in maintaining real-time performance while ensuring accuracy, thereby limiting their practical applicability. This study proposes a novel cascaded framework that integrates RT-DETR-based detection with OCR capabilities. The framework incorporates several key methodological innovations: optimizing the RT-DETR backbone through efficient partial convolutions during training to improve computational efficiency; implementing Conv3XC to modify the ResNet18-backbone BasicBlock using a triple convolutional layer configuration with an enhanced RepC3 kernel design for better feature extraction; and integrating learned position encoding (LPE) to improve the AIFI position encoding mechanism, thereby enhancing detection capabilities. After region detection, PP-OCRv3 is used for character recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach: Ship-RT-DETR achieves 96.2% detection accuracy with a 28.5% reduction in parameters and 67.3 FPS, while PP-OCRv3 achieves 91.6% recognition accuracy. Extensive environmental validation across diverse weather conditions (sunny, cloudy, rainy, and foggy) confirms the framework’s robustness, maintaining a detection accuracy above 90% even in challenging foggy conditions, with minimal performance degradation (a 7.7% decrease from optimal conditions). The system’s consistent performance across various environmental conditions (detection standard deviation: 2.84%, OCR confidence standard deviation: 0.0295) establishes a novel and robust methodology for practical SLPR applications.

The rich spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture the complicated target appearance variations in visual tracking. However, most top-performing tracking algorithms rely on many hand-crafted components for spatio-temporal information aggregation. Consequently, the spatio-temporal information is far away from being fully explored. To alleviate this issue, we propose an adaptive tracker with spatio-temporal transformers (named AQATrack), which adopts simple autoregressive queries to effectively learn spatio-temporal information without many hand-designed components. Firstly, we introduce a set of learnable and autoregressive queries to capture the instantaneous target appearance changes in a sliding window fashion. Then, we design a novel attention mechanism for the interaction of existing queries to generate a new query in current frame. Finally, based on the initial target template and learnt autoregressive queries, a spatio-temporal information fusion module (STM) is designed for spatiotemporal formation aggregation to locate a target object. Benefiting from the STM, we can effectively combine the static appearance and instantaneous changes to guide robust tracking. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves the tracker's performance on six popular tracking benchmarks: LaSOT, LaSOText, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, TNL2K, and UAV123.

The consistency between the semantic information provided by the multi-modal reference and the tracked object is crucial for visual-language (VL) tracking. However, existing VL tracking frameworks rely on static multi-modal references to locate dynamic objects, which can lead to semantic discrepancies and reduce the robustness of the tracker. To address this issue, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework, named DUTrack, which captures the latest state of the target by dynamically updating multi-modal references to maintain consistency. Specifically, we introduce a Dynamic Language Update Module, which leverages a large language model to generate dynamic language descriptions for the object based on visual features and object category information. Then, we design a Dynamic Template Capture Module, which captures the regions in the image that highly match the dynamic language descriptions. Furthermore, to ensure the efficiency of description generation, we design an update strategy that assesses changes in target displacement, scale, and other factors to decide on updates. Finally, the dynamic template and language descriptions that record the latest state of the target are used to update the multi-modal references, providing more accurate reference information for subsequent inference and enhancing the robustness of the tracker. DUTrack achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four mainstream vision-language and two vision-only tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, LaSOT$_{\rm{ext}}$, TNL2K, OTB99-Lang, GOT-10K, and UAV123. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/DUTrack.