Continuous spatio temporal prompts for visual tracking

Currently, visual single-object tracking methods utilize online template updates to combine temporal information. However, these methods rely on confidence scores to evaluate the reliability of the current template, which may result in a template not being updated for an extended period. Moreover, advanced trackers select bounding boxes based solely on the similarity between the template and the search area, which can lead to tracking drift when encountering deformable or similar targets. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a Spatio Temporal Prompt Tracker (STPTrack), which utilizes the prior information about small changes of object state between successive frames. Different from previous tracking methods that mainly rely on templates and similarity scores, STPTrack transfers the object position and shape information of the previous frame to the current frame as continuous spatio temporal prompt for the first time, and realizes the efficient fusion of spatio temporal information through the prompt encoder and the fusion decoder module. Specifically, it encodes the bounding box coordinates or mask information of the previous frame and the response points of the current frame as prompt features, and then combines prompt tokens with search tokens through the fusion decoder to provide the potential location of the object for the search feature map. Our STPTrack sets a new state-of-the-art performance on six tracking benchmark datasets.