That Person Moves Like A Car: Misclassification Attack Detection for Autonomous Systems Using Spatiotemporal Consistency

Autonomous systems commonly rely on object detection and tracking (ODT) to perceive the environment and predict the trajectory of surrounding objects for planning purposes. An ODT’s output contains object classes and tracks that are traditionally predicted independently. Recent studies have shown that ODT’s output can be falsified by various perception attacks with well-crafted noise, but existing defenses are limited to specific noise injection methods and thus fail to generalize. In this work we propose PercepGuard for the detection of misclassification attacks against perception modules regardless of attack methodologies. PercepGuard exploits the spatiotemporal properties of a detected object (inherent in the tracks), and cross-checks the consistency between the track and class predictions. To improve adversarial robustness against defense-aware (adaptive) attacks, we additionally consider context data (such as ego-vehicle velocity) for contextual consistency verification, which dramatically increases the attack difficulty. Evaluations with both real-world and simulated datasets produce a FPR of 5% and a TPR of 99% against adaptive attacks. A baseline comparison confirms the advantage of leveraging temporal features. Real-world experiments with displayed and projected adversarial patches show that PercepGuard detects 96% of the attacks on average.