DiffusionTrack: Point Set Diffusion Model for Visual Object Tracking

Fei Xie, Zhongdao Wang, Chao Ma; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19113-19124

Existing Siamese or transformer trackers commonly pose visual object tracking as a one-shot detection problem i.e. locating the target object in a single forward evaluation scheme. Despite the demonstrated success these trackers may easily drift towards distractors with similar appearance due to the single forward evaluation scheme lacking self-correction. To address this issue we cast visual tracking as a point set based denoising diffusion process and propose a novel generative learning based tracker dubbed DiffusionTrack. Our DiffusionTrack possesses two appealing properties: 1) It follows a novel noise-to-target tracking paradigm that leverages multiple denoising diffusion steps to localize the target in a dynamic searching manner per frame. 2) It models the diffusion process using a point set representation which can better handle appearance variations for more precise localization. One side benefit is that DiffusionTrack greatly simplifies the post-processing e.g. removing window penalty scheme. Without bells and whistles our DiffusionTrack achieves leading performance over the state-of-the-art trackers and runs in real-time. The code is in https://github.com/VISION-SJTU/DiffusionTrack.