GCAT: graph calibration attention transformer for robust object tracking

Recent Siamese trackers have taken advantage of transformers to achieve impressive advancements. However, existing transformer trackers ignore considering the positional and structural information between tokens, and traditional template update strategies easily introduce noises to the dynamic templates during tracking. In order to alleviate this issue, this paper develops a novel end-to-end graph calibration attention transformer network (GCAT) to enhance tracking robustness and accuracy. A graph calibration attention mechanism is first designed to calibrate and aggregate template information, for effectively updating dynamic templates during the tracking process. Specifically, each token is considered as a node in the graph, and then, we calculate the weight relationships between each node and their adjacent nodes. Thus, this mechanism can aggregate the global context information of the template and search nodes and activate feature channels based on weights and biases to obtain more discriminative feature information. Moreover, we leverage a multi-level dropout mechanism to perform the data dropout, the layer dropout, and the feature dropout on the data, network, and attention levels, respectively, to avoid overfitting of local-specific information and improve the generalization ability. Extensive experiments show the proposed method achieves superior performance on seven challenging benchmark datasets, i.e., OTB100, OTB2013, UAV123, LaSOT, GOT10K, VOT2020, and TrackingNet.