ShrinkBox: Backdoor Attack on Object Detection to Disrupt Collision Avoidance in Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shahzad, Muhammad Zaeem, Hanif, Muhammad Abdullah, Ouni, Bassem, Shafique, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shahzad, Muhammad Zaeem
Hanif, Muhammad Abdullah
Ouni, Bassem
Shafique, Muhammad
author_facet Shahzad, Muhammad Zaeem
Hanif, Muhammad Abdullah
Ouni, Bassem
Shafique, Muhammad
contents Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) significantly enhance road safety by detecting potential collisions and alerting drivers. However, their reliance on expensive sensor technologies such as LiDAR and radar limits accessibility, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Machine learning-based ADAS (ML-ADAS), leveraging deep neural networks (DNNs) with only standard camera input, offers a cost-effective alternative. Critical to ML-ADAS is the collision avoidance feature, which requires the ability to detect objects and estimate their distances accurately. This is achieved with specialized DNNs like YOLO, which provides real-time object detection, and a lightweight, detection-wise distance estimation approach that relies on key features extracted from the detections like bounding box dimensions and size. However, the robustness of these systems is undermined by security vulnerabilities in object detectors. In this paper, we introduce ShrinkBox, a novel backdoor attack targeting object detection in collision avoidance ML-ADAS. Unlike existing attacks that manipulate object class labels or presence, ShrinkBox subtly shrinks ground truth bounding boxes. This attack remains undetected in dataset inspections and standard benchmarks while severely disrupting downstream distance estimation. We demonstrate that ShrinkBox can be realized in the YOLOv9m object detector at an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 96%, with only a 4% poisoning ratio in the training instances of the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, given the low error targets introduced in our relaxed poisoning strategy, we find that ShrinkBox increases the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in downstream distance estimation by more than 3x on poisoned samples, potentially resulting in delays or prevention of collision warnings altogether.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_18656
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ShrinkBox: Backdoor Attack on Object Detection to Disrupt Collision Avoidance in Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Shahzad, Muhammad Zaeem
Hanif, Muhammad Abdullah
Ouni, Bassem
Shafique, Muhammad
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) significantly enhance road safety by detecting potential collisions and alerting drivers. However, their reliance on expensive sensor technologies such as LiDAR and radar limits accessibility, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Machine learning-based ADAS (ML-ADAS), leveraging deep neural networks (DNNs) with only standard camera input, offers a cost-effective alternative. Critical to ML-ADAS is the collision avoidance feature, which requires the ability to detect objects and estimate their distances accurately. This is achieved with specialized DNNs like YOLO, which provides real-time object detection, and a lightweight, detection-wise distance estimation approach that relies on key features extracted from the detections like bounding box dimensions and size. However, the robustness of these systems is undermined by security vulnerabilities in object detectors. In this paper, we introduce ShrinkBox, a novel backdoor attack targeting object detection in collision avoidance ML-ADAS. Unlike existing attacks that manipulate object class labels or presence, ShrinkBox subtly shrinks ground truth bounding boxes. This attack remains undetected in dataset inspections and standard benchmarks while severely disrupting downstream distance estimation. We demonstrate that ShrinkBox can be realized in the YOLOv9m object detector at an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 96%, with only a 4% poisoning ratio in the training instances of the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, given the low error targets introduced in our relaxed poisoning strategy, we find that ShrinkBox increases the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in downstream distance estimation by more than 3x on poisoned samples, potentially resulting in delays or prevention of collision warnings altogether.
title ShrinkBox: Backdoor Attack on Object Detection to Disrupt Collision Avoidance in Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18656