STCA: High-Altitude Tracking via Single-Drone Tracking and Cross-Drone Association

In this paper, we introduce a high-altitude multi-drone multi-target (HAMDMT) tracking method called STCA, which aims to collaboratively track similar targets that are easily confused. We approach this challenge by categorizing the HAMDMT tracking into two principal tasks: Single-Drone Tracking and Cross-Drone Association. Single-Drone Tracking employs positional and appearance data vectors to overcome the challenges arising from similar target appearances within the field of view of a single drone. The Cross-Drone Association employs image-matching technology (LightGlue) to ascertain the topological relationships between images captured by disparate drones, thereby accurately determining the associations between targets across multiple drones. In Cross-Drone Association, we enhanced LightGlue into a more efficacious method, designated T-LightGlue, for cross-drone target tracking. This approach markedly accelerates the tracking process while reducing indicator dropout. To narrow down the range of targets involved in the cross-drone association, we develop a Common View Area Model based on the four vertices of the image. Considering to mitigate the occlusion encountered by high-altitude drones, we design a Local-Matching Model that assigns the same ID to the mutually nearest pair of targets from different drones after mapping the centroids of the targets across drones. The MDMT dataset is the only one captured by a high-altitude drone and contains a substantial number of similar vehicles. In the MDMT dataset, the STCA achieves the highest MOTA in Single-Drone Tracking, with the IDF1 system achieving the second-highest performance and the MDA system achieving the highest performance in Cross-Drone Association.