UAV Visual Target Tracking: Research Status, Algorithms and Future Prospect

Nowadays the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely used in civilian and military fields, such as target search and tracking, owing to its small size and unique flexibility. Although visual target tracking technology has made remarkable progress, it is still a challenging problem to achieve robust and stable tracking due to various factors in actual complex environment. Firstly, this paper introduces the research status of target tracking, and reviews some classical and latest UAV target tracking algorithms, especially single-UAV and multi-UAV cooperative target tracking algorithms. Then, the UAV datasets and evaluation metrics of target tracking have been introduced. Finally, the future directions of UAV target tracking algorithms are proposed.