Visual and Language Collaborative Learning for RGBT Object Tracking

Despite the extensive research on RGBT object tracking, there are still several challenges and issues in practical applications, such as modality differences, lighting variations and disappearance of the target, and changes in viewpoint. Existing methods mostly address these issues by fusing image features, while neglecting a significant amount of target label information. To address these challenges, this paper introduces text to drive the alignment of visible and infrared image features, transforming features from different modalities into the same feature space and fully using complementary features between different modalities. Furthermore, inspired by the success of prompt learning in various tasks, we utilize prior boxes and language as prompts to further guide the model in tracking the target. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed VLCTrack tracker has excellent potential in RGBT object tracking. Compared to previous methods developed for this purpose, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.