In video object tracking, there exist rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which have been largely overlooked in existing trackers. In this work, we bridge the individual video frames and explore the temporal contexts across them via a transformer architecture for robust object tracking. Different from classic usage of the transformer in natural language processing tasks, we separate its encoder and decoder into two parallel branches and carefully design them within the Siamese-like tracking pipelines. The transformer encoder promotes the target templates via attention-based feature reinforcement, which benefits the high-quality tracking model generation. The transformer decoder propagates the tracking cues from previous templates to the current frame, which facilitates the object searching process. Our transformer-assisted tracking framework is neat and trained in an end-to-end manner. With the proposed transformer, a simple Siamese matching approach is able to outperform the current top-performing trackers. By combining our transformer with the recent discriminative tracking pipeline, our method sets several new state-of-the-art records on prevalent tracking benchmarks.

本文提出了一个基于transformer的视频物体跟踪器，在Siamese-like跟踪管道中，编码器在模板中注入了基于注意力机制的特征强化以增强模型生成质量，解码器传递上一个模板的跟踪线索到当前帧以方便目标搜索，结果本方法作为一种最先进的记录在普遍跟踪基准上获得了成功。

Transformer Meets Tracker: 挖掘时间上下文，提高鲁棒性视觉跟踪