{"ID":2833042,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04883","arxiv_id":"2512.04883","title":"SDG-Track: A Heterogeneous Observer-Follower Framework for High-Resolution UAV Tracking on Embedded Platforms","abstract":"Real-time tracking of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on edge devices faces a fundamental resolution-speed conflict. Downsampling high-resolution imagery to standard detector input sizes causes small target features to collapse below detectable thresholds. Yet processing native 1080p frames on resource-constrained platforms yields insufficient throughput for smooth gimbal control. We propose SDG-Track, a Sparse Detection-Guided Tracker that adopts an Observer-Follower architecture to reconcile this conflict. The Observer stream runs a high-capacity detector at low frequency on the GPU to provide accurate position anchors from 1920x1080 frames. The Follower stream performs high-frequency trajectory interpolation via ROI-constrained sparse optical flow on the CPU. To handle tracking failures from occlusion or model drift caused by spectrally similar distractors, we introduce Dual-Space Recovery, a training-free re-acquisition mechanism combining color histogram matching with geometric consistency constraints. Experiments on a ground-to-air tracking station demonstrate that SDG-Track achieves 35.1 FPS system throughput while retaining 97.2\\% of the frame-by-frame detection precision. The system successfully tracks agile FPV drones under real-world operational conditions on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Our paper code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jeffry-wen/SDG-Track","short_abstract":"Real-time tracking of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on edge devices faces a fundamental resolution-speed conflict. Downsampling high-resolution imagery to standard detector input sizes causes small target features to collapse below detectable thresholds. Yet processing native 1080p frames on resource-constraine...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04883","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04883v2","authors":"[\"Jiawen Wen\",\"Yu Hu\",\"Suixuan Qiu\",\"Jinshan Huang\",\"Xiaowen Chu\"]","published":"2025-12-04T15:11:43Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":606295,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2833042,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04883","paper_title":"SDG-Track: A Heterogeneous Observer-Follower Framework for High-Resolution UAV Tracking on Embedded Platforms","repo_url":"https://github.com/Jeffry-wen/SDG-Track","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}