UAST: Unified Active Search and Tracking for Arbitrary Targets with UAVs

Liang Qin, Min Wang, Xingyu Lu, Aowen Qiu, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 13464-13473

Active search and tracking of arbitrary targets by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cluttered environments remains a highly challenging problem. Existing methods either construct complex modular pipelines, leading to substantial computational costs, or adopt end-to-end controllers that often fail to generalize across different targets and scenes. Moreover, search and tracking are typically treated separately despite their strong interdependence. In this paper, we present UAST, a simple yet effective mapping-free framework that unifies active search and persistent tracking using only RGB-D observations. The proposed system couples a dual-branch perception module with a Rule-Based Point Search Policy that adaptively switches between tracking and search-based recovery. A lightweight control network generates dynamically feasible trajectories directly from fused perception and UAV states. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy with an elaborated tracking-aware visibility loss and a tailored data construction. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments show that our approach achieves higher success rates, more stable long-term tracking, and faster target search compared with existing methods, while maintaining high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/qinliangql/UAST.