Image sensors are integral to a wide range of safety- and security-critical systems, including surveillance infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation. These systems rely on the integrity of visual data to make decisions. In this work, we investigate a novel class of electromagnetic signal injection attacks that target the analog domain of image sensors, allowing adversaries to manipulate raw visual inputs without triggering conventional digital integrity checks. We uncover a previously undocumented attack phenomenon on CMOS image sensors: rainbow-like color artifacts induced in images captured by image sensors through carefully tuned electromagnetic interference. We further evaluate the impact of these attacks on state-of-the-art object detection models, showing that the injected artifacts propagate through the image signal processing pipeline and lead to significant mispredictions. Our findings highlight a critical and underexplored vulnerability in the visual perception stack, highlighting the need for more robust defenses against physical-layer attacks in such systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.07773,
title = {Rainbow Artifacts from Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks on Image Sensors},
author = {Youqian Zhang and Xinyu Ji and Zhihao Wang and Qinhong Jiang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07773},
year = {2025}
}