The gradual development of remote sensing object tracking technology based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) videos has become one of the main research directions in the field of visual tracking. However, due to characteristics of the UAV platform, typical visual tracking algorithms currently applied to natural scenes cannot be used directly. Small-scale objects in UAV remote sensing videos are difficult to detect and have the problem of tracking identity switching. In order to solve these problems, we designed the Swin transformer neck YOLOX (STN-YOLOX) object detection algorithm as the detection module, and the G-Byte data association method as the tracking module. We then combined the two into a new multi-object tracking algorithm named STN-Track. We used STN-Track to conduct experiments on the UAVDT and VisDrone MOT datasets. The experimental results show that compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our STN-Track has improved detection and tracking accuracy of small-scale objects and greatly improved identification capabilities for object tracking. Compared with the SOTA ByteTrack algorithm, MOTA of STN-Track can be improved by up to 3.2%, APS can be improved by up to 4.4%, MT can be improved by up to 6.8%, and IDSW can be reduced by up to 28.0%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.