VL-UniTrack: A Unified Framework with Visual-Language Prompts for UAV-Ground Visual Tracking

원문 초록

UAV-ground visual tracking (UGVT) aims to simultaneously track the same target from both UAV and ground views. However, existing two-stream methods suffer from isolated feature extraction and rely heavily on implicit appearance matching, which often fails to establish reliable cross-view correspondence under drastic viewpoint discrepancies, thereby leading to unstable tracking. To address these issues, we propose VL-UniTrack, a unified framework enhanced by visual-language prompts. By encoding features from both views with a single shared encoder, our method reduces feature isolation between the two views and enables sufficient cross-view interaction. To alleviate the ambiguity caused by appearance-only matching, we further design a visual-language viewpoint prompting module that fuses language descriptions with visual features to generate learnable prompts. These prompts are then injected into a prompt-guided cross-view adapter to facilitate cross-view interaction and guide the learning of view-specific feature representations. In addition, we introduce a confidence-modulated mutual distillation loss to regularize training by suppressing noise propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VL-UniTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/xuboyue1999/VL-UniTrack.git.