What's Wrong with the Robustness of Object Detectors?

ZiYi Dong, Pengxu Wei, Liang Lin

Keywords: Object Detection, Adversarial Robustness

Abstract: Despite tremendous successes achieved, object detection models confront the vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Even with imperceptible adversarial perturbations in images, they probably yield erroneous detection predictions, posing a threat to various realistic applications, e.g., medical diagnosis and automatic driving. Although some existing methods can improve the adversarial robustness of detectors, they still suffer from the detection robustness bottleneck: the significant performance degradation on clean images and the limited robustness on adversarial images. In this paper, we conduct empirically a comprehensive investigation on what's wrong with the robustness of object detectors in four different seminal architectures, i.e., two-stage, one-stage, anchor-free, and Transformer-based detectors, inspiring more research interest on this task. We also devise a Detection Confusion Matrix (DCM) and Classification-Ablative Validation (ClsAVal) for further detection robustness analyses. We explore underlying factors that account for robustness bottleneck. It is empirically demonstrated that robust detectors have reliable localization robustness and poor classification robustness. The classification module easily mis-classifies the foreground objects into the background. Furthermore, Robust Derformable-DETR suffers from a poor classification and localization robustness. Our source codes, trained models, and detailed experiment results will be publicly available.

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