Fully Spiking Neural Networks with Target Awareness for Energy-Efficient UAV Tracking

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), characterized by their event-driven computation and low power consumption, have shown great potential for energy-efficient visual tracking on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing efficient SNN-based trackers heavily rely on costly event cameras, limiting their deployment on UAVs. To address this limitation, we propose STATrack, an efficient fully spiking neural network framework for UAV visual tracking using RGB inputs only. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to investigate spiking neural networks for UAV visual tracking tasks. To mitigate the weakening of target features by background tokens, we propose adaptively maximizing the mutual information between templates and features. Extensive experiments on four widely used UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that STATrack achieves competitive tracking performance while maintaining low energy consumption.