Enhancing visual object tracking robustness through a lightweight denoising module

Abstract Visual object tracking is crucial for numerous applications ranging from smartphones to autonomous vehicles. However, the impact of input noise on tracking performance remains underexplored. This paper presents a lightweight neural network module designed to enhance the robustness of 2D tracking methods against various types of noise. By performing image-to-image translation, the proposed robust tracking module (RTM) standardizes the operational space of tracking algorithms, thereby improving their resilience. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of RTM in mitigating performance degradation caused by noise. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation toolkit that facilitates the assessment of tracking robustness against common noise types. The source code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/iason1907/RTM .