SatSOT: A Benchmark Dataset for Satellite Video Single Object Tracking

Abstract

By imaging a specific area continuously, satellite video shows excellent capability in various applications such as surveillance and traffic management. Although object tracking has made significant progress in recent years, development in satellite object tracking is limited by the lack of open-source satellite datasets. It is thus essential to establish a satellite video object-tracking benchmark to fill the gap and advance the research. In this work, we present SatSOT, the first densely annotated satellite video single object-tracking benchmark dataset. SatSOT consists of 105 sequences with 27664 frames, 11 attributes, and four categories of typical moving targets in satellite videos: car, plane, ship, and train. Based on the proposed dataset and the significant challenges in satellite video object tracking, such as small targets, background interference, and severe occlusion, detailed evaluation and analysis are performed on 15 among the best and most representative tracking algorithms, which provides a basis for further research on satellite video object tracking.