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Title: Fooling Detection Alone is Not Enough: Adversarial Attack against Multiple Object Tracking

Paper content:
Recent work in adversarial machine learning started to focus on the visual perception in autonomous driving and studied Adversarial Examples (AEs) for object detection models.
However, in such visual perception pipeline the detected objects must also be tracked, in a process called Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), to build the moving trajectories of surrounding obstacles.
Since MOT is designed to be robust against errors in object detection, it poses a general challenge to existing attack techniques that blindly target objection detection: we find that a success rate of over 98% is needed for them to actually affect the tracking results, a requirement that no existing attack technique can satisfy.
In this paper, we are the first to study adversarial machine learning attacks against the complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, and discover a novel attack technique, tracker hijacking, that can effectively fool MOT using AEs on object detection.
Using our technique, successful AEs on as few as one single frame can move an existing object in to or out of the headway of an autonomous vehicle to cause potential safety hazards.
We perform evaluation using the Berkeley Deep Drive dataset and find that on average when 3 frames are attacked, our attack can have a nearly 100% success rate while attacks that blindly target object detection only have up to 25%.
Since the first Adversarial Example (AE) against traffic sign image classification discovered by Eykholt et al. (Eykholt et al., 2018) , several research work in adversarial machine learning (Eykholt et al., 2017; Xie et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2017a; b; Zhao et al., 2018b; Chen et al., 2018; Cao et al., 2019) started to focus on the context of visual perception in autonomous driving, and studied AEs on object detection models.
For example, Eykholt et al. (Eykholt et al., 2017) and Zhong et al. (Zhong et al., 2018) studied AEs in the form of adversarial stickers on stop signs or the back of front cars against YOLO object detectors (Redmon & Farhadi, 2017) , and performed indoor experiments to demonstrate the attack feasibility in the real world.
Building upon these work, most recently Zhao et al. (Zhao et al., 2018b) leveraged image transformation techniques to improve the robustness of such adversarial sticker attacks in outdoor settings, and were able to achieve a 72% attack success rate with a car running at a constant speed of 30 km/h on real roads.
While these results from prior work are alarming, object detection is in fact only the first half of the visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, or in robotic systems in general -in the second half, the detected objects must also be tracked, in a process called Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), to build the moving trajectories, called trackers, of surrounding obstacles.
This is required for the subsequent driving decision making process, which needs the built trajectories to predict future moving trajectories for these obstacles and then plan a driving path accordingly to avoid collisions with them.
To ensure high tracking accuracy and robustness against errors in object detection, in MOT only the detection results with sufficient consistency and stability across multiple frames can be included in the tracking results and actually influence the driving decisions.
Thus, MOT in the visual The complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, i.e., both object detection and Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) (Baidu; Kato et al., 2018; 2015; Zhao et al., 2018a; Ess et al., 2010; MathWorks; Udacity) .
perception of autonomous driving poses a general challenge to existing attack techniques that blindly target objection detection.
For example, as shown by our analysis later in §4, an attack on objection detection needs to succeed consecutively for at least 60 frames to fool a representative MOT process, which requires an at least 98% attack success rate ( §4).
To the best of our knowledge, no existing attacks on objection detection can achieve such a high success rate (Eykholt et al., 2017; Xie et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2017a; b; Zhao et al., 2018b; Chen et al., 2018) .
In this paper, we are the first to study adversarial machine learning attacks considering the complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, i.e., both object detection and object tracking, and discover a novel attack technique, called tracker hijacking, that can effectively fool the MOT process using AEs on object detection.
Our key insight is that although it is highly difficult to directly create a tracker for fake objects or delete a tracker for existing objects, we can carefully design AEs to attack the tracking error reduction process in MOT to deviate the tracking results of existing objects towards an attacker-desired moving direction.
Such process is designed for increasing the robustness and accuracy of the tracking results, but ironically, we find that it can be exploited by attackers to substantially alter the tracking results.
Leveraging such attack technique, successful AEs on as few as one single frame is enough to move an existing object in to or out of the headway of an autonomous vehicle and thus may cause potential safety hazards.
We select 20 out of 100 randomly sampled video clips from the Berkeley Deep Drive dataset for evaluation.
Under recommended MOT configurations in practice (Zhu et al., 2018) and normal measurement noise levels, we find that our attack can succeed with successful AEs on as few as one frame, and 2 to 3 consecutive frames on average.
We reproduce and compare with previous attacks that blindly target object detection, and find that when attacking 3 consecutive frames, our attack has a nearly 100% success rate while attacks that blindly target object detection only have up to 25%.
Contributions.
In summary, this paper makes the following contributions:
• We are the first to study adversarial machine learning attacks considering the complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, i.e., both object detection and MOT.
We find that without considering MOT, an attack blindly targeting object detection needs at least a success rate of 98% to actually affect the complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, which is a requirement that no existing attack technique can satisfy.
• We discover a novel attack technique, tracker hijacking, that can effectively fool MOT using AEs on object detection.
This technique exploits the tracking error reduction process in MOT, and can enable successful AEs on as few as one single frame to move an existing object in to or out of the headway of an autonomous vehicle to cause potential safety hazards.
• The attack evaluation using the Berkeley Deep Drive dataset shows that our attack can succeed with successful AEs on as few as one frame, and only 2 to 3 consecutive frames on average, and when 3 consecutive frames are attacked, our attack has a nearly 100% success rate while attacks that blindly target object detection only have up to 25%.
• Code and evaluation data are all available at GitHub (Github).
Implications for future research in this area.
Today, adversarial machine learning research targeting the visual perception in autonomous driving, no matter on attack or defense, uses the accuracy of objection detection as the de facto evaluation metric (Luo et al., 2014) .
However, as concretely shown in our work, without considering MOT, successful attacks on the detection results alone do not have direct implication on equally or even closely successful attacks on the MOT results, the final output of the visual perception task in real-world autonomous driving (Baidu; Kato et al., 2018) .
Thus, we argue that future research in this area should consider: (1) using the MOT accuracy as the evaluation metric, and (2) instead of solely focusing on object detection, also studying weaknesses specific to MOT or interactions between MOT and object detection, which is a highly under-explored research space today.
This paper marks the first research effort towards both directions.
Practicality improvement.
Our evaluation currently are all conducted digitally with captured video frames, while our method should still be effective when applied to generate physical patches.
For example, our proposed adversarial patch generation method can be naturally combined with different techniques proposed by previous work to enhance reliability of AEs in the physical world (e.g., non-printable loss (Sharif et al., 2016) and expectation-over-transformation (Athalye et al., 2017) ).
We leave this as future work.
Generality improvement.
Though in this work we focused on MOT algorithm that uses IoU based data association, our approach of finding location to place adversarial bounding box is generally applicable to other association mechanisms (e.g., appearance-based matching).
Our AE generation algorithm against YOLOv3 should also be applicable to other object detection models with modest adaptations.
We plan to provide reference implementations of more real-world end-to-end visual perception pipelines to pave the way for future adversarial learning research in self-driving scenarios.
In this work, we are the first to study adversarial machine learning attacks against the complete visual perception pipeline in autonomous driving, i.e., both object detection and MOT.
We discover a novel attack technique, tracker hijacking, that exploits the tracking error reduction process in MOT and can enable successful AEs on as few as one frame to move an existing object in to or out of the headway of an autonomous vehicle to cause potential safety hazards.
The evaluation results show that on average when 3 frames are attacked, our attack can have a nearly 100% success rate while attacks that blindly target object detection only have up to 25%.
The source code and data is all available at (Github).
Our discovery and results strongly suggest that MOT should be systematically considered and incorporated into future adversarial machine learning research targeting the visual perception in autonomous driving.
Our work initiates the first research effort along this direction, and we hope that it can inspire more future research into this largely overlooked research perspective.

assistant: text: We study the adversarial machine learning attacks against the Multiple Object Tracking mechanisms for the first time.