DCTracker: Differential Motion Compensation Based Multi-Object Tracking in Satellite Videos

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in satellite videos is a vital technique in Earth observation, serving various purposes such as smart city management and military target reconnaissance. However, satellite videos face several challenges, including wide observation ranges, low target pixel proportions, and significant background interference such as cloud drift and lighting changes. Relying solely on appearance features from single-frame videos is insufficient for fully identifying targets; extracting target motion information across multiple frames is also necessary for assistance.This paper introduces an innovative integrated real-time architecture for multi-object tracking, named DCTracker. Specifically, to address the loss of target motion information and the issue of weak targets being easily obscured by noise, we designed a differential compensation module to enhance discrimination between targets and noise by analyzing the motion characteristics of targets across consecutive video frames. Experimental results show that DCTracker achieves advanced performance, with an accuracy score of 61.3% on the VISO dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex tracking scenarios.