Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2025
Abstract
Event cameras, known for their low latency and high dynamic range, show great potential in pedestrian detection applications. However, while recent research has primarily focused on improving detection accuracy, the robustness of event-based visual models against physical adversarial attacks has received limited attention. For example, adversarial physical objects, such as specific clothing patterns or accessories, can exploit inherent vulnerabilities in these systems, leading to misdetections or misclassifications. This study is the first to explore physical adversarial attacks on event-driven pedestrian detectors, specifically investigating whether certain clothing patterns worn by pedestrians can cause these detectors to fail, effectively rendering them unable to detect the person. To address this, we developed an end-to-end adversarial framework in the digital domain, framing the design of adversarial clothing textures as a 2D texture optimization problem. By crafting an effective adversarial loss function, the framework iteratively generates optimal textures through backpropagation. Our results demonstrate that the textures identified in the digital domain possess strong adversarial properties. Furthermore, we translated these digitally optimized textures into physical clothing and tested them in real-world scenarios, successfully demonstrating that the designed textures significantly degrade the performance of event-based pedestrian detection models. This work highlights the vulnerability of such models to physical adversarial attacks.
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
Research Areas
Intelligent Systems and Optimization
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
AAAI'25/IAAI'25/EAAI'25: Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-Seventh Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Fifteenth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 25 - March 4
First Page
5227
Last Page
5235
Identifier
10.1609/aaai.v39i5.32555
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
LIN, Guixu; NIU, Muyao; ZHU, Qingtian; YIN, Zhengwei; LI, Zhuoxiao; HE, Shengfeng; and ZHENG, Yinqiang.
Adversarial attacks on event-based pedestrian detectors: A physical approach. (2025). AAAI'25/IAAI'25/EAAI'25: Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-Seventh Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Fifteenth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 25 - March 4. 5227-5235.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10689
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i5.32555
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons