A Fast Dynamic Dim Target Tracking Approach for UAVs Using Improved Lightweight Siamese Networks

The target tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted significant attention recently with the increasing application of UAVs, yet few studies have made breakthroughs in dynamic dim target detection. How to efficiently and accurately identify dynamic dim targets in complex contexts poses a challenge. To address this issue, we proposed an improved lightweight Siamese network (ILSN) with an optimized feature-extraction network design and similarity measurement.As for the feature-extraction network, we built a position-wise attention module to obtain the target feature's position information, which enhanced the network's ability to extract weak targets while reducing the model parameters, thus ensuring the network is lightweight. For the similarity-measurement module, the tracking accuracy was expected to be improved by deeply mining the localization information of the shallow features and the semantic information of the deep features in the feature networks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we established a simulated experimental environment and a physical experimental platform and then carried out comparison experiments on the attention modules, tracking accuracy, and efficiency performance. The experimental results showed that, compared with the five introduced comparison algorithms, the ILSN had apparent advantages in tracking accuracy: the tracking speed reached 108 frames per second, which met the real-time requirements while improving the success rate.