English

AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-07-19 v1

Abstract

AI-based visual perception systems are increasingly deployed in infrastructure surveillance, including roadside monitoring units, highway cameras, and smart-city pedestrian management systems. The security vulnerability of these systems to physical adversarial attacks poses a direct threat to the reliable operation of transportation infrastructure. We propose AdvSerial, a dynamic 2D--3D joint optimization framework for generating continuous high-angle physical adversarial patches against pedestrian detectors in infrastructure-based scenarios. We UV-map a boundary-aware quilted texture onto 3D garments, combine 2D digital attacks with 3D sparse- and continuous-frame rendering, and explicitly suppress person-specific semantic features while enforcing temporal continuity. A Feature Smooth Quilting strategy reduces visible patch boundaries and bounds cross-seam feature discontinuities. A serial-frame loss encourages long uninterrupted sequences of detection failures. In physical world experiments, AdvSerial achieves a 74.8% attack success rate on YOLO-v5 and degrades mean detection confidence from 84.30% to 39.38%. Experiments spanning eight detectors with different architectures demonstrate strong transferability. Notably, it achieves an 89.7189.71% attack success rate on YOLO-v2 and resists both patch-detection defenses (NapGuard) and 3D-temporal perception (Sparse4D-v3). The results reveal persistent, temporally consistent failure modes under high-angle surveillance, and motivate the design of motion-aware and 3D-aware defenses for security-critical infrastructure deployments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.17069,
  title  = {AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression},
  author = {Yuanhao Huang and Yilong Ren and Jinlei Wang and Xuesong Bai and Jinchuan Zhang and Haiyang Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.17069},
  year   = {2026}
}