Counteracting Adversarial Attacks in Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we focus on studying robust deep stereo vision of autonomous driving systems and counteracting adversarial attacks against it. Autonomous system operation requires real-time processing of measurement data which often contain significant uncertainties and noise. Adversarial attacks have been widely studied to simulate these perturbations in recent years. To counteract these attacks in autonomous systems, a novel defense method is proposed in this paper. A stereo-regularizer is proposed to guide the model to learn the implicit relationship between the left and right images of the stereo-vision system. Univariate and multivariate functions are adopted to characterize the relationships between the two input images and the object detection model. The regularizer is then relaxed to its upper bound to improve adversarial robustness. Furthermore, the upper bound is approximated by the remainder of its Taylor expansion to improve the local smoothness of the loss surface. The model parameters are trained via adversarial training with the novel regularization term. Our method exploits basic knowledge from the physical world, i.e., the mutual constraints of the two images in the stereo-based system. As such, outliers can be detected and defended with high accuracy and efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method offers superior performance when compared with traditional adversarial training methods in state-of-the-art stereo-based 3D object detection models for autonomous vehicles.