  RGB-T tracking involves the use of images from both visible and thermal
modalities. The primary objective is to adaptively leverage the relatively
dominant modality in varying conditions to achieve more robust tracking
compared to single-modality tracking. An RGB-T tracker based on mixed attention
mechanism to achieve complementary fusion of modalities (referred to as MACFT)
is proposed in this paper. In the feature extraction stage, we utilize
different transformer backbone branches to extract specific and shared
information from different modalities. By performing mixed attention operations
in the backbone to enable information interaction and self-enhancement between
the template and search images, it constructs a robust feature representation
that better understands the high-level semantic features of the target. Then,
in the feature fusion stage, a modality-adaptive fusion is achieved through a
mixed attention-based modality fusion network, which suppresses the low-quality
modality noise while enhancing the information of the dominant modality.
Evaluation on multiple RGB-T public datasets demonstrates that our proposed
tracker outperforms other RGB-T trackers on general evaluation metrics while
also being able to adapt to longterm tracking scenarios.
