UAST: Unified Active Search and Tracking for Arbitrary Targets with UAVs
Qin, Liang, Wang, Min, Lu, Xingyu, Qiu, Aowen, Zhou, Wengang, Li, Houqiang
原文摘要
Active search and tracking of arbitrary targets by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cluttered environments remains a highly challenging problem. Existing methods either construct complex modular pipelines, leading to substantial computational costs, or adopt end-to-end controllers that often fail to generalize across different targets and scenes. Moreover, search and tracking are typically treated separately despite their strong interdependence. In this paper, we present UAST, a simple yet effective mapping-free framework that unifies active search and persistent tracking using only RGB-D observations. The proposed system couples a dual-branch perception module with a Rule-Based Point Search Policy that adaptively switches between tracking and search-based recovery. A lightweight control network generates dynamically feasible trajectories directly from fused perception and UAV states. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy with an elaborated tracking-aware visibility loss and a tailored data construction. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments show that our approach achieves higher success rates, more stable long-term tracking, and faster target search compared with existing methods, while maintaining high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/qinliangql/UAST.
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表