Real-Time Occluded Target Detection and Collaborative Tracking Method for UAVs

To address the failure of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target tracking caused by occlusion and limited field of view in dense low-altitude obstacle environments, this paper proposes a novel framework integrating occlusion-aware modeling and multi-UAV collaboration. A lightweight tracking model based on the Mamba backbone is developed, incorporating a Dilated Wavelet Receptive Field Enhancement Module (DWRFEM) to fuse multi-scale contextual features, significantly mitigating contour fragmentation and feature degradation under severe occlusion. A dual-branch feature optimization architecture is designed, combining the Distilled Tanh Activation with Context (DiTAC) activation function and Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) bottleneck layers to enhance discriminative feature representation. To overcome the limitations of single-UAV perception, a multi-UAV cooperative system is established. Ray intersection is employed to reduce localization uncertainty, while spherical sampling viewpoints are dynamically generated based on obstacle density. Safe trajectory planning is achieved using a Crested Porcupine Optimizer (CPO). Experiments on the Multi-Drone Multi-Target Tracking (MDMT) dataset demonstrate that the model achieves 84.1% average precision (AP) at 95 Frames Per Second (FPS), striking a favorable balance between speed and accuracy, making it suitable for edge deployment. Field tests with three collaborative UAVs show sustained target coverage in complex environments, outperforming traditional single-UAV approaches. This study provides a systematic solution for robust tracking in challenging low-altitude scenarios.