TPatch: A Triggered Physical Adversarial Patch
Wenjun Zhu Xiaoyu Ji Yushi Cheng Shibo Zhang Wenyuan Xu
Autonomous vehicles increasingly utilize the vision-based perception module
to acquire information about driving environments and detect obstacles. Correct
detection and classification are important to ensure safe driving decisions.
Existing works have demonstrated the feasibility of fooling the perception
models such as object detectors and image classifiers with printed adversarial
patches. However, most of them are indiscriminately offensive to every passing
autonomous vehicle. In this paper, we propose TPatch, a physical adversarial
patch triggered by acoustic signals. Unlike other adversarial patches, TPatch
remains benign under normal circumstances but can be triggered to launch a
hiding, creating or altering attack by a designed distortion introduced by
signal injection attacks towards cameras. To avoid the suspicion of human
drivers and make the attack practical and robust in the real world, we propose
a content-based camouflage method and an attack robustness enhancement method
to strengthen it. Evaluations with three object detectors, YOLO V3/V5 and
Faster R-CNN, and eight image classifiers demonstrate the effectiveness of
TPatch in both the simulation and the real world. We also discuss possible
defenses at the sensor, algorithm, and system levels.