  Given the ability to directly manipulate image pixels in the digital input
space, an adversary can easily generate imperceptible perturbations to fool a
Deep Neural Network (DNN) image classifier, as demonstrated in prior work. In
this work, we propose ShapeShifter, an attack that tackles the more challenging
problem of crafting physical adversarial perturbations to fool image-based
object detectors like Faster R-CNN. Attacking an object detector is more
difficult than attacking an image classifier, as it needs to mislead the
classification results in multiple bounding boxes with different scales.
Extending the digital attack to the physical world adds another layer of
difficulty, because it requires the perturbation to be robust enough to survive
real-world distortions due to different viewing distances and angles, lighting
conditions, and camera limitations. We show that the Expectation over
Transformation technique, which was originally proposed to enhance the
robustness of adversarial perturbations in image classification, can be
successfully adapted to the object detection setting. ShapeShifter can generate
adversarially perturbed stop signs that are consistently mis-detected by Faster
R-CNN as other objects, posing a potential threat to autonomous vehicles and
other safety-critical computer vision systems.
