Open-World Drone Active Tracking with Goal-Centered Rewards

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00744v2
• Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 07:43:03 GMT
• Title: Open-World Drone Active Tracking with Goal-Centered Rewards
• Authors: Haowei Sun, Jinwu Hu, Zhirui Zhang, Haoyuan Tian, Xinze Xie, Yufeng Wang, Xiaohua Xie, Yun Lin, Zhuliang Yu, Mingkui Tan,
• Abstract summary: Drone Visual Active Tracking aims to autonomously follow a target object by controlling the motion system based on visual observations.<n>We propose DAT, the first open-world drone active air-to-ground tracking benchmark.<n>We also propose GC-VAT, which aims to improve the performance of drone tracking targets in complex scenarios.
• Score: 62.21394499788672
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Drone Visual Active Tracking aims to autonomously follow a target object by controlling the motion system based on visual observations, providing a more practical solution for effective tracking in dynamic environments. However, accurate Drone Visual Active Tracking using reinforcement learning remains challenging due to the absence of a unified benchmark and the complexity of open-world environments with frequent interference. To address these issues, we pioneer a systematic solution. First, we propose DAT, the first open-world drone active air-to-ground tracking benchmark. It encompasses 24 city-scale scenes, featuring targets with human-like behaviors and high-fidelity dynamics simulation. DAT also provides a digital twin tool for unlimited scene generation. Additionally, we propose a novel reinforcement learning method called GC-VAT, which aims to improve the performance of drone tracking targets in complex scenarios. Specifically, we design a Goal-Centered Reward to provide precise feedback across viewpoints to the agent, enabling it to expand perception and movement range through unrestricted perspectives. Inspired by curriculum learning, we introduce a Curriculum-Based Training strategy that progressively enhances the tracking performance in complex environments. Besides, experiments on simulator and real-world images demonstrate the superior performance of GC-VAT, achieving a Tracking Success Rate of approximately 72% on the simulator. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/SHWplus/DAT_Benchmark.

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