Natural Light Can Also Be Dangerous: Traffic Sign Misinterpretation Under Adversarial Natural Light Attacks

Teng-Fang Hsiao, Bo-Lun Huang, Zi-Xiang Ni, Yan-Ting Lin, Hong-Han Shuai, Yung-Hui Li, Wen-Huang Cheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 3915-3924

Common illumination sources like sunlight or artificial light may introduce hidden vulnerabilities to AI systems. Our paper delves into these potential threats, offering a novel approach to simulate varying light conditions, including sunlight, headlights, and flashlight illuminations. Moreover, unlike typical physical adversarial attacks requiring conspicuous alterations, our method utilizes a model-agnostic black-box attack integrated with the Zeroth Order Optimization (ZOO) algorithm to identify deceptive patterns in a physically-applicable space. Consequently, attackers can recreate these simulated conditions, deceiving machine learning models with seemingly natural light. Empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of our method, misleading models trained on the GTSRB and LISA datasets under natural-like physical environments with an attack success rate exceeding 70% across all digital datasets, and remaining effective against all evaluated real-world traffic signs. Importantly, after adversarial training using samples generated from our approach, models showcase enhanced robustness, underscoring the dual value of our work in both identifying and mitigating potential threats.