Synergistic FrequencySpatial Enhancement With Temporal Correlation for Robust Satellite Video Tracking

Xiaowen Zhang, Haijiang Sun, Hanqing Sun, Qiaoyuan Liu, Xinglong Sun, Xinyi Yao

Abstract: The adjacency effect introduces a coupled challenge of blurry targets and similar-object interference in satellite videos, leading to severe ambiguity in template matching and error accumulation in existing satellite video single object tracking (SOT) methods. Current approaches rely mainly on spatial or temporal modeling, or employ frequency-spatial fusion in either serial or coupled forms, but fail to prevent crossdomain error propagation. To meet the coupled adjacency effect challenge, we present a Synergistic Perception Tracker (SPTrack) that integrates frequency, spatial, and temporal reasoning. The core of SPTrack is the Frequency-Spatial Separate-Interact (FSSI) block, which optimizes frequency restoration via Adaptive Frequency Recalibration (AFR) and spatial localization via Multi-scale Context Extraction (MCE), and then establishes a bidirectional interaction through a Frequency-Spatial Interaction (FSI) module. This design preserves domain-specific strengths while enabling frequency contours to guide spatial representation learning for robust localization under blur. To further resolve spatial ambiguity caused by similar objects, we introduce an Inter-Frame Temporal Correlation (IFTC) module that exploits historical trajectories and score-map memory to perform driftaware centroid correction and temporally consistent box refinement. The composition of the above frequency-spatial-temporal synergistic perception methods can track more robustly in scenes affected by the adjacency effect. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public SatSOT, SV248s, and OOTB datasets, where SPTrack achieves competitive performance with a success rate of 55.4% and 45.6% on challenging low quality and similar object attributes, a success rate of 49.9% and precision of 65.6% overall performance, while operating at 164.4 FPS. Moreover, our proposed modules can also be integrated into other one-stream trackers as a general solution for the adjacency effect in satellite video SOT. The tracking results and code of the SPTrack will be available at: https://github.com/MaxCobb/SPTrack

External IDs:doi:10.1109/jstars.2026.3662714