Adversarial Attacks and Detection in Visual Place Recognition for Safer Robot Navigation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the impact of adversarial attacks on visual place recognition for robot navigation and proposes an adversarial attack detection framework that significantly improves localization accuracy and safety.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experiment paradigm integrating VPR, attack detection, and navigation, demonstrating substantial performance improvements with AADs in robotic systems.

Findings

AADs can reduce localization error by ~50%.

Detection accuracy of 75% TP and 25% FP improves safety.

FGSM attack is effective against VPR systems.

Abstract

Stand-alone Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems have little defence against a well-designed adversarial attack, which can lead to disastrous consequences when deployed for robot navigation. This paper extensively analyzes the effect of four adversarial attacks common in other perception tasks and four novel VPR-specific attacks on VPR localization performance. We then propose how to close the loop between VPR, an Adversarial Attack Detector (AAD), and active navigation decisions by demonstrating the performance benefit of simulated AADs in a novel experiment paradigm -- which we detail for the robotics community to use as a system framework. In the proposed experiment paradigm, we see the addition of AADs across a range of detection accuracies can improve performance over baseline; demonstrating a significant improvement -- such as a ~50% reduction in the mean along-track localization error -- can be achieved with True Positive and False Positive detection rates of only 75% and up to 25% respectively. We examine a variety of metrics including: Along-Track Error, Percentage of Time Attacked, Percentage of Time in an `Unsafe' State, and Longest Continuous Time Under Attack. Expanding further on these results, we provide the first investigation into the efficacy of the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial attack for VPR. The analysis in this work highlights the need for AADs in real-world systems for trustworthy navigation, and informs quantitative requirements for system design.