Low-Altitude Multi-Object Tracking via Graph Neural Networks with Cross-Attention and Reliable Neighbor Guidance

In low-altitude multi-object tracking (MOT), challenges such as frequent inter-object occlusion and complex non-linear motion disrupt the appearance of individual targets and the continuity of their trajectories, leading to frequent tracking failures. We posit that the relatively stable spatio-temporal relationships within object groups (e.g., pedestrians and vehicles) offer powerful contextual cues to resolve such ambiguities. We present NOWA-MOT (Neighbors Know Who We Are), a novel tracking-by-detection framework designed to systematically exploit this principle through a multi-stage association process. We make three primary contributions. First, we introduce a Low-Confidence Occlusion Recovery (LOR) module that dynamically adjusts detection scores by integrating IoU, a novel Recovery IoU (RIoU) metric, and location similarity to surrounding objects, enabling occluded targets to participate in high-priority matching. Second, for initial data association, we propose a Graph Cross-Attention (GCA) mechanism. In this module, separate graphs are constructed for detections and trajectories, and a cross-attention architecture is employed to propagate rich contextual information between them, yielding highly discriminative feature representations for robust matching. Third, to resolve the remaining ambiguities, we design a cascaded Matched Neighbor Guidance (MNG) module, which uniquely leverages the reliably matched pairs from the first stage as contextual anchors. Through MNG, star-shaped topological features are built for unmatched objects relative to their stable neighbors, enabling accurate association even when intrinsic features are weak. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation on the VisDrone2019 and UAVDT datasets confirms the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art HOTA scores of 51.34% and 62.69%, respectively, and drastically reducing identity switches compared to previous methods.