Bilateral Adversarial Patch Generating Network for the Object Tracking Algorithm

Abstract

Deep learning-based algorithms for single object tracking (SOT) have shown impressive performance but remain susceptible to adversarial patch attacks. However, existing adversarial patch generation methods primarily focus on generating patches within the search region, neglecting the incorporation of template information, which limits their effectiveness in carrying out successful attacks. There is also a lack of evaluation metrics to assess the patch’s adversarial abilities. In this study, we propose a bilateral adversarial patch-generating network to address these limitations and advance the field of adversarial patch generation for SOT networks. Our network leverages a Focus structure that effectively integrates both template and search region information, generating separate adversarial patches for each branch. We also introduce the DeFocus structure to solve the size discrepancy between the template and search region of the tracking network. To effectively mislead the tracking network, we have designed adversarial object loss and adversarial regression loss functions tailored to the network’s output. Moreover, we propose a comprehensive evaluation metric that measures the patch’s adversarial ability by establishing a relationship between the relative patch size and attack performance. As UAV view data often constitute small objects requiring smaller patches, we evaluate our approach on the UAV123 and UAVDT datasets. Our evaluation encompasses not only the overall attack performance but also the effectiveness of our strategy and the transferability of the attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm generates patches with higher attack efficiency compared to existing methods.