TrackFlood: Relocating Latency Attacks from NMS-Free Detectors to Real-Time Trackers
TrackFlood overloads real-time trackers behind NMS-free detectors, causing deadline misses at higher budgets.
TrackFlood is a white-box latency attack that shifts sponge-style overload from NMS-free detectors to downstream multi-object tracking. It targets YOLOv10, YOLO26, and RT-DETR detect-then-track pipelines, creating spatially distributed phantom detections while leaving detector inference time essentially unchanged. On an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with TensorRT FP16, an L-infinity budget of 8/255 caused measurable tracker overload but only modest end-to-end slowdown; a higher-budget stress test produced severe slowdowns and sustained deadline misses. A bounded-admission layer largely restored latency while dropping some clean detections.
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