Robust Object Detection Fusion against Deception

Abstract

Deep neural network (DNN) based object detection has become an integral part of numerous cyber-physical systems, perceiving physical environments and responding proactively to real-time events. Recent studies reveal that well-trained multi-task learners like DNN-based object detectors perform poorly in the presence of deception. This paper presents FUSE, a deception-resilient detection fusion approach with three novel contributions. First, we develop diversity-enhanced fusion teaming mechanisms, including diversity-enhanced joint training algorithms, for producing high diversity fusion detectors. Second, we introduce a three-tier detection fusion framework and a graph partitioning algorithm to construct fusion-verified detection outputs through three mutually reinforcing components: objectness fusion, bounding box fusion, and classification fusion. Third but not least, we provide a formal analysis of robustness enhancement by FUSE-protected systems. Extensive experiments are conducted on eleven detectors from three families of detection algorithms on two benchmark datasets. We show that FUSE guarantees strong robustness in mitigating the state-of-the-art deception attacks, including adversarial patches - a form of physical attacks using confined visual distortion.