Enhancing Tracking Robustness with Auxiliary Adversarial Defense Networks

Adversarial attacks in visual object tracking have significantly degraded the performance of advanced trackers by introducing imperceptible perturbations into images. These attack methods have garnered considerable attention from researchers in recent years. However, there is still a lack of research on designing adversarial defense methods specifically for visual object tracking. To address these issues, we propose an effective additional pre-processing network called DuaLossDef that eliminates adversarial perturbations during the tracking process. DuaLossDef is deployed ahead of the search branche or template branche of the tracker to apply defensive transformations to the input images. Moreover, it can be seamlessly integrated with other visual trackers as a plug-and-play module without requiring any parameter adjustments. We train DuaLossDef using adversarial training, specifically employing Dua-Loss to generate adversarial samples that simultaneously attack the classification and regression branches of the tracker. Extensive experiments conducted on the OTB100, LaSOT, and VOT2018 benchmarks demonstrate that DuaLossDef maintains excellent defense robustness against adversarial attack methods in both adaptive and non-adaptive attack scenarios. Moreover, when transferring the defense network to other trackers, it exhibits reliable transferability. Finally, DuaLossDef achieves a processing time of up to 5ms/frame, allowing seamless integration with existing high-speed trackers without introducing significant computational overhead. We will make our code publicly available soon.