SCA-MMA: Spatial and Channel-Aware Multi-Modal Adaptation for Robust RGB-T Object Tracking

The RGB and thermal (RGB-T) object tracking task is challenging, especially with various target changes caused by deformation, abrupt motion, background clutter and occlusion. It is critical to employ the complementary nature between visual RGB and thermal infrared data. In this work, we address the RGB-T object tracking task with a novel spatial- and channel-aware multi-modal adaptation (SCA-MMA) framework, which builds an adaptive feature learning process for better mining this object-aware information in a unified network. For each type of modality information, the spatial-aware adaptation mechanism is introduced to dynamically learn the location-based characteristics of specific tracking objects at multiple convolution layers. Further, the channel-aware multi-modal adaptation mechanism is proposed to adaptively learn the feature fusion/aggregation of different modalities. In order to perform object tracking, we employ a binary classification module with two fully connected layers to predict the bounding boxes of specific targets. Comprehensive evaluations on GTOT and RGBT234 datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our proposed SCA-MMA for robust RGB-T object tracking tasks. In particular, the precision rate (PR) and success rate (SR) on GTOT and RGBT234 datasets can reach 90.5%/73.2% and 80.2%/56.9%, significantly higher than the state-of-the-art algorithms