Papers › Understanding Object Detection Through An Adversarial Lens

Understanding Object Detection Through An Adversarial Lens

11 Jul 2020arXiv:2007.05828archive 2025-07-28

Ka-Ho Chow, Ling Liu, Mehmet Emre Gursoy, Stacey Truex, Wenqi Wei, Yanzhao Wu

Deep neural networks based object detection models have revolutionized computer vision and fueled the development of a wide range of visual recognition applications. However, recent studies have revealed that deep object detectors can be compromised under adversarial attacks, causing a victim detector to detect no object, fake objects, or mislabeled objects. With object detection being used pervasively in many security-critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities, we argue that a holistic approach for an in-depth understanding of adversarial attacks and vulnerabilities of deep object detection systems is of utmost importance for the research community to develop robust defense mechanisms. This paper presents a framework for analyzing and evaluating vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art object detectors under an adversarial lens, aiming to analyze and demystify the attack strategies, adverse effects, and costs, as well as the cross-model and cross-resolution transferability of attacks. Using a set of quantitative metrics, extensive experiments are performed on six representative deep object detectors from three popular families (YOLOv3, SSD, and Faster R-CNN) with two benchmark datasets (PASCAL VOC and MS COCO). We demonstrate that the proposed framework can serve as a methodical benchmark for analyzing adversarial behaviors and risks in real-time object detection systems. We conjecture that this framework can also serve as a tool to assess the security risks and the adversarial robustness of deep object detectors to be deployed in real-world applications.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

git-disl/TOG mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Adversarial RobustnessAutonomous VehiclesObjectObject DetectionReal-Time Object Detectionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionConvolutionNon Maximum SuppressionSSD

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections