Decoupling Representation for Nighttime Aerial Tracking

Xu Lei, Yan Zhang, Chang Xu, Wen Yang, Wensheng Cheng

Abstract: Nighttime aerial tracking is an indispensable step towards around-the-clock real-world applications. However, RGBbased tracking algorithms face significant challenges at night due to their vulnerability to illumination. Observing that different feature channels have varying sensitivity to illumination, we propose to decouple the representation for illuminationsensitive and illumination-insensitive embeddings. We devise a Nighttime aerial tracking scheme via Decouple Representations, termed NiDR, where the Illumination-Invariant Embedding (IIE) module and the Illumination-Sensitive Embedding (ISE) module are designed to decouple representations. We achieve this semantic decoupling by utilizing a pair of normlight and low-light images and regulating the reconstruction and consistency relations between features. Experiments on UAVDark135 exhibit the remarkable performance of NiDR under challenging nighttime scenarios, surpassing the secondbest competitor by a large margin of 3.1% on precision.