Fractured Glass, Failing Cameras: Simulating Physics-Based Adversarial Samples for Autonomous Driving Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of physical camera failures, specifically glass fractures, on autonomous vehicle perception systems by simulating realistic fracture scenarios and evaluating their effect on object detection models.

Contribution

It introduces a physics-based simulation method for generating realistic camera glass fractures and assesses their impact on autonomous driving perception models.

Findings

Broken glass significantly reduces detection accuracy.

Simulated fractures cause measurable distribution shifts in data.

Physical failure simulations reveal vulnerabilities in perception systems.

Abstract

While much research has recently focused on generating physics-based adversarial samples, a critical yet often overlooked category originates from physical failures within on-board cameras-components essential to the perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Camera failures, whether due to external stresses causing hardware breakdown or internal component faults, can directly jeopardize the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. Firstly, we motivate the study using two separate real-world experiments to showcase that indeed glass failures would cause the detection based neural network models to fail. Secondly, we develop a simulation-based study using the physical process of the glass breakage to create perturbed scenarios, representing a realistic class of physics-based adversarial samples. Using a finite element model (FEM)-based approach, we generate surface cracks on the camera image by applying a stress field defined by particles within a triangular mesh. Lastly, we use physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to provide realistic visualizations of these physically plausible fractures. To assess the safety implications, we apply the simulated broken glass effects as image filters to two autonomous driving datasets- KITTI and BDD100K- as well as the large-scale image detection dataset MS-COCO. We then evaluate detection failure rates for critical object classes using CNN-based object detection models (YOLOv8 and Faster R-CNN) and a transformer-based architecture with Pyramid Vision Transformers. To further investigate the distributional impact of these visual distortions, we compute the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between three distinct data distributions, applying various broken glass filters to a custom dataset (captured through a cracked windshield), as well as the KITTI and Kaggle cats and dogs datasets.