Physically Realizable Adversarial Examples for LiDAR Object Detection

James Tu, Mengye Ren, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Ming Liang, Bin Yang, Richard Du, Frank Cheng, Raquel Urtasun; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 13716-13725

Modern autonomous driving systems rely heavily on deep learning models to process point cloud sensory data; meanwhile, deep models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks with visually imperceptible perturbations. Despite the fact that this poses a security concern for the self-driving industry, there has been very little exploration in terms of 3D perception, as most adversarial attacks have only been applied to 2D flat images. In this paper, we address this issue and present a method to generate universal 3D adversarial objects to fool LiDAR detectors. In particular, we demonstrate that placing an adversarial object on the rooftop of any target vehicle to hide the vehicle entirely from LiDAR detectors with a success rate of 80%. We report attack results on a suite of detectors using various input representation of point clouds. We also conduct a pilot study on adversarial defense using data augmentation. This is one step closer towards safer self-driving under unseen conditions from limited training data.