Laser Shield: a Physical Defense with Polarizer against Laser Attacks on Autonomous Driving Systems

Qingjie Zhang, Lijun Chi, Di Wang, Mounira Msahli, Gérard Memmi, Tianwei Zhang, Chao Zhang, Han Qiu

Abstract: Autonomous driving systems (ADS) are boosted with deep neural networks (DNN) to perceive environments, while their security is doubted by DNN's vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Among them, a diversity of laser attacks emerges to be a new threat due to its minimal requirements and high attack success rate in the physical world. Nevertheless, current defense methods exhibit either a low defense success rate or a high computation cost against laser attacks. To fill this gap, we propose Laser Shield which leverages a polarizer along with a min-energy rotation mechanism to eliminate adversarial lasers from ADS scenes. We also provide a physical world dataset, LAPA, to evaluate its performance. Through exhaustive experiments with three baselines, four metrics, and three settings, Laser Shield is proved to surpass SOTA performance.