Deceiving Image-to-Image Translation Networks for Autonomous Driving With Adversarial Perturbations

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved impressive performance on handling computer vision problems. However, it has been found that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples. For such reason, adversarial perturbations have been recently studied in several respects. However, most previous works have focused on image classification tasks, and it has never been studied regarding adversarial perturbations on Image-to-image (Im2Im) translation tasks, showing great success in handling paired and/or unpaired mapping problems in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. This letter examines different types of adversarial perturbations that can fool Im2Im frameworks for autonomous driving purposes. We propose both quasi-physical and digital adversarial perturbations that can make Im2Im models yield unexpected results. We then empirically analyze these perturbations and show that they generalize well under both paired for image synthesis and unpaired settings for style transfer. We also validate that there exist some perturbation thresholds over which the Im2Im mapping is disrupted or impossible. The existence of these perturbations reveals that there exist crucial weaknesses in Im2Im models. Lastly, we show that our methods illustrate how perturbations affect the quality of outputs, pioneering the improvement of the robustness of current SOTA networks for autonomous driving.