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Main Authors: Yong, Yixing, Wang, Jian, Lei, Ming, He, Lijun, Li, Fan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17822
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author Yong, Yixing
Wang, Jian
Lei, Ming
He, Lijun
Li, Fan
author_facet Yong, Yixing
Wang, Jian
Lei, Ming
He, Lijun
Li, Fan
contents Infrared object detection is crucial for perception in autonomous driving and surveillance but remains vulnerable to physical adversarial attacks. Unlike in the RGB domain, where attacks rely on color texture, infrared attacks must manipulate thermal signatures, making the geometry shape of heat-blocking materials the primary adversarial information carrier. Current shape-based methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off between representational capability and optimization power, limiting their attack effectiveness.In this work, we overcome this dilemma by introducing learnable Fourier shapes to the infrared domain. We utilize an end-to-end differentiable framework where a compact set of Fourier coefficients, defining the shape boundary, is analytically mapped to a pixel-space mask via the winding number theorem. This enables efficient gradient-based optimization to generate potent shapes that cause human targets to evade detection. Extensive digital and physical experiments provide a comprehensive evaluation and validate our superior performance. Our resulting physical patch achieves striking robustness, successfully evading detectors across diverse distances, angles, poses, and individuals, and achieves over 88% attack success rate at distances greater than 25m (conf.=0.5). Code is available at https://github.com/Yongyx99/Fourier-shape-attack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17822
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unleashing the Representational Power of Fourier Shapes for Attacking Infrared Object Detection
Yong, Yixing
Wang, Jian
Lei, Ming
He, Lijun
Li, Fan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Infrared object detection is crucial for perception in autonomous driving and surveillance but remains vulnerable to physical adversarial attacks. Unlike in the RGB domain, where attacks rely on color texture, infrared attacks must manipulate thermal signatures, making the geometry shape of heat-blocking materials the primary adversarial information carrier. Current shape-based methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off between representational capability and optimization power, limiting their attack effectiveness.In this work, we overcome this dilemma by introducing learnable Fourier shapes to the infrared domain. We utilize an end-to-end differentiable framework where a compact set of Fourier coefficients, defining the shape boundary, is analytically mapped to a pixel-space mask via the winding number theorem. This enables efficient gradient-based optimization to generate potent shapes that cause human targets to evade detection. Extensive digital and physical experiments provide a comprehensive evaluation and validate our superior performance. Our resulting physical patch achieves striking robustness, successfully evading detectors across diverse distances, angles, poses, and individuals, and achieves over 88% attack success rate at distances greater than 25m (conf.=0.5). Code is available at https://github.com/Yongyx99/Fourier-shape-attack.
title Unleashing the Representational Power of Fourier Shapes for Attacking Infrared Object Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17822