Correlation has a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion manner to consider the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation is a local linear matching process, losing semantic information and falling into local optimum easily, which may be the bottleneck of designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. In this work, to determine whether a better feature fusion method exists than correlation, a novel attention-based feature fusion network, inspired by Transformer, is presented. This network effectively combines the template and the search region features using attention. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. First, we present a Transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression head. Based on the TransT baseline, we further design a segmentation branch to generate an accurate mask. Finally, we propose a stronger version of TransT by extending TransT with a multi-template design and an IoU prediction head, named TransT-M. Experiments show that our TransT and TransT-M methods achieve promising results on seven popular datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT-M.
View on arXiv