PAD: Patch-Agnostic Defense against Adversarial Patch Attacks
Authors: Lihua Jing, Rui Wang, Wenqi Ren, Xin Dong, Cong Zou

Adversarial patch attacks present a significant threat to real-world object detectors due to their practical feasibility. Existing defense methods which rely on attack data or prior knowledge struggle to effectively address a wide range of adversarial patches. In this paper we show two inherent characteristics of adversarial patches semantic independence and spatial heterogeneity independent of their appearance shape size quantity and location. Semantic independence indicates that adversarial patches operate autonomously within their semantic context while spatial heterogeneity manifests as distinct image quality of the patch area that differs from original clean image due to the independent generation process. Based on these observations we propose PAD a novel adversarial patch localization and removal method that does not require prior knowledge or additional training. PAD offers patch-agnostic defense against various adversarial patches compatible with any pre-trained object detectors. Our comprehensive digital and physical experiments involving diverse patch types such as localized noise printable and naturalistic patches exhibit notable improvements over state-of-the-art works. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lihua-Jing/PAD.