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1. Role of Spatial Context in Adversarial Robustness for Object Detection

   Saha, Aniruddha (July 2020, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops)

   The benefits of utilizing spatial context in fast object detection algorithms have been studied extensively. Detectors increase inference speed by doing a single forward pass per image which means they implicitly use contextual reasoning for their predictions. However, one can show that an adversary can design adversarial patches which do not overlap with any objects of interest in the scene and exploit con- textual reasoning to fool standard detectors. In this paper, we examine this problem and design category specific adversarial patches which make a widely used object detector like YOLO blind to an attacker chosen object category. We also show that limiting the use of spatial context during object detector training improves robustness to such adversaries. We believe the existence of context based adversarial attacks is concerning since the adversarial patch can affect predictions without being in vicinity of any objects of interest. Hence, defending against such attacks becomes challenging and we urge the research community to give attention to this vulnerability. 

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2. An Integrated Mobile Vision System for Enhancing the Interaction of Blind and Low Vision Users with Their Surroundings [An Integrated Mobile Vision System for Enhancing the Interaction of Blind and Low Vision Users with Their Surroundings]

   https://doi.org/10.5220/0011984400003497  

   Chen, Jin; Ramnath, Satesh; Samaroo, Tyron; Maksakuli, Fani; Ruci, Arber; Sturdivant, E’edresha; Zhu, Zhigang (January 2023, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Image Processing and Vision Engineering)

   This paper presents a mobile-based solution that integrates 3D vision and voice interaction to assist people who are blind or have low vision to explore and interact with their surroundings. The key components of the system are the two 3D vision modules: the 3D object detection module integrates a deep-learning based 2D object detector with ARKit-based point cloud generation, and an interest direction recognition module integrates hand/finger recognition and ARKit-based 3D direction estimation. The integrated system consists of a voice interface, a task scheduler, and an instruction generator. The voice interface contains a customized user request mapping module that maps the user’s input voice into one of the four primary system operation modes (exploration, search, navigation, and settings adjustment). The task scheduler coordinates with two web services that host the two vision modules to allocate resources for computation based on the user request and network connectivity strength. Finally, the instruction generator computes the corresponding instructions based on the user request and results from the two vision modules. The system is capable of running in real time on mobile devices. We have shown preliminary experimental results on the performance of the voice to user request mapping module and the two vision modules. 

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3. Physical Adversarial Examples for Object Detectors

   Eykholt, Kevin; Evtimov, Ivan; Fernandes, Earlence; Li, Bo; Rahmati, Amir; Tramer, Florian; Prakash, Atul; Kohno, Tadayoshi; Song, Dawn (August 2018, 12th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 18))

   Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples—maliciously crafted inputs that cause DNNs to make incorrect predictions. Recent work has shown that these attacks generalize to the physical domain, to create perturbations on physical objects that fool image classifiers under a variety of real-world conditions. Such attacks pose a risk to deep learning models used in safety-critical cyber-physical systems. In this work, we extend physical attacks to more challenging object detection models, a broader class of deep learning algorithms widely used to detect and label multiple objects within a scene. Improving upon a previous physical attack on image classifiers, we create perturbed physical objects that are either ignored or mislabeled by object detection models. We implement a Disappearance Attack, in which we cause a Stop sign to “disappear” according to the detector—either by covering the sign with an adversarial Stop sign poster, or by adding adversarial stickers onto the sign. In a video recorded in a controlled lab environment, the state-of-the-art YOLO v2 detector failed to recognize these adversarial Stop signs in over 85% of the video frames. In an outdoor experiment, YOLO was fooled by the poster and sticker attacks in 72.5% and 63.5% of the video frames respectively. We also use Faster R-CNN, a different object detection model, to demonstrate the transferability of our adversarial perturbations. The created poster perturbation is able to fool Faster R-CNN in 85.9% of the video frames in a controlled lab environment, and 40.2% of the video frames in an outdoor environment. Finally, we present preliminary results with a new Creation Attack, wherein innocuous physical stickers fool a model into detecting nonexistent objects. 

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4. Study of AI Object Detection: Patterns on Animals with YOLO and Adversarial Patches

   Hopson, Aniya; Boonthum-Denecke, Chutima; Mkpong-Ruffin, Idongesit (March 2025, The 2025 ADMI Symposium.)

   In this paper, we document our findings from previous research and literature related to adversarial examples and object detection. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an increasingly powerful tool in various fields, particularly in image classification and object detection. As AI becomes more advanced, new methods to deceive machine learning models, such as adversarial patches, have emerged. These subtle modifications to images can cause AI models to misclassify objects, posing a significant challenge to their reliability. This research builds upon our earlier work by investigating how small patches affect object detection on YOLOv8. Last year, we explored patterns within images and their impact on model accuracy. This study extends that work by testing how adversarial patches, particularly those targeting animal patterns, affect YOLOv8's ability to accurately detect objects. We also explore how untrained patterns influence the model’s performance, aiming to identify weaknesses and improve the robustness of object detection systems. 

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5. Feature Compression for Rate Constrained Object Detection on the Edge

   Yuan, Zhongzheng; Samyak Rawlekar; Siddharth Garg; Elza Erkip; Yao Wang (August 2022, In MLSys 2023 Workshop on Resource-Constrained Learning in Wireless Networks)

   Recent advances in computer vision has led to a growth of interest in deploying visual analytics model on mobile devices. However, most mobile devices have limited computing power, which prohibits them from running large scale visual analytics neural networks. An emerging approach to solve this problem is to offload the computation of these neural networks to computing resources at an edge server. Efficient computation offloading requires optimizing the trade-off between multiple objectives including compressed data rate, analytics performance, and computation speed. In this work, we consider a “split computation” system to offload a part of the computation of the YOLO object detection model. We propose a learnable feature compression approach to compress the intermediate YOLO features with lightweight computation. We train the feature compression and decompression module together with the YOLO model to optimize the object detection accuracy under a rate constraint. Compared to baseline methods that apply either standard image compression or learned image compression at the mobile and perform image de-compression and YOLO at the edge, the proposed system achieves higher detection accuracy at the low to medium rate range. Furthermore, the proposed system requires substantially lower computation time on the mobile device with CPU only. 

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