CST Anti-UAV: A Thermal Infrared Benchmark for Tiny UAV Tracking in Complex Scenes

TL;DR

The paper introduces CST Anti-UAV, a comprehensive thermal infrared dataset for tiny UAV tracking in complex scenes, highlighting the challenges and limitations of current methods and datasets.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed thermal infrared dataset with manual annotations for tiny UAVs in complex scenes, enabling better evaluation and development of tracking algorithms.

Findings

State-of-the-art methods perform poorly on tiny UAVs in complex scenes.

Existing benchmarks are insufficient for real-world UAV tracking challenges.

The dataset facilitates targeted improvements in anti-UAV tracking systems.

Abstract

The widespread application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has raised serious public safety and privacy concerns, making UAV perception crucial for anti-UAV tasks. However, existing UAV tracking datasets predominantly feature conspicuous objects and lack diversity in scene complexity and attribute representation, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we present the CST Anti-UAV, a new thermal infrared dataset specifically designed for Single Object Tracking (SOT) in Complex Scenes with Tiny UAVs (CST). It contains 220 video sequences with over 240k high-quality bounding box annotations, highlighting two key properties: a significant number of tiny-sized UAV targets and the diverse and complex scenes. To the best of our knowledge, CST Anti-UAV is the first dataset to incorporate complete manual frame-level attribute annotations, enabling precise evaluations under varied challenges. To conduct an in-depth performance analysis for CST Anti-UAV, we evaluate 20 existing SOT methods on the proposed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that tracking tiny UAVs in complex environments remains a challenge, as the state-of-the-art method achieves only 35.92% state accuracy, much lower than the 67.69% observed on the Anti-UAV410 dataset. These findings underscore the limitations of existing benchmarks and the need for further advancements in UAV tracking research. The CST Anti-UAV benchmark is about to be publicly released, which not only fosters the development of more robust SOT methods but also drives innovation in anti-UAV systems.