Spectral-Aware Proposal Enhancement for Diffusion-Based Multispectral UAV Multi-Object Tracking

Xu Lin, Tingfa Xu, Tianhao Li, Haolin Qin, Huawei Gao +2

Multispectral UAV multi-object tracking (MOT) with oriented bounding boxes remains challenging due to small targets, cluttered backgrounds, and unstable inter-frame associations. Although diffusion-based MOT provides an effective iterative proposal refinement paradigm, existing diffusion-based trackers lack dedicated designs for exploiting multispectral cues in proposal initialization and confidence calibration, limiting tracking robustness in complex UAV scenarios. This letter proposes DSATrack, a diffusion-guided spectral-aware tracking framework for multispectral UAV MOT. Specifically, a lightweight spectral encoder injects multispectral information into the RPN branch through feature fusion, enabling the RPN head to generate high-quality object-aware proposals. These proposals are then injected into the initial proposal set to provide reliable spatial priors for diffusion refinement. Furthermore, a spectral-saliency confidence modulation strategy recalibrates refined tracking confidence according to local multispectral saliency contrast before score thresholding, enhancing spectrally reliable candidates while suppressing unreliable ones. Without modifying the original…