Feature-Aware Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Visual Object Tracking
Mengdi Dong, Ke Xu, Xinghao Jiang, Zeyu Zhao, Tanfeng Sun · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2025
Visual object tracking is susceptible to adversarial attacks, posing significant security concerns for numerous application systems. Previous attack methods focused on white-box and untargeted attacks against response map. However, obtaining the tracking model in real-world scenarios is challenging, and the resulting adversarial trajectories are often unrealistic, making the attacks easily detectable. This paper proposes a Feature-aware Transferable Adversarial Patch (FTAP) that induces any black-box trackers to follow controllable and smooth trajectories. Tracker Following Assurance module is designed to manipulate bounding boxes to be valid and tightly align with the fake target. The movement of the tracker can be precisely controlled, resulting in adversarial trajectories stable and closely resemble natural trajectories, thereby reducing the risk of detection. The adversarial perturbation is generated solely from the initial template and applied to each frame. Consequently, the well-optimized generator can output universal adversarial patch capable of attacking any video without requiring additional computations. The intermediate layer features are corrupted to make the characteristics of the fake target closer to those of ground truth. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FTAP achieves state-of-the-art black-box attack performance and transferability across various tracker architectures.