Laser Shield: a Physical Defense with Polarizer against Laser Attacks on Autonomous Driving Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADS) are boosted with deep neural networks (DNN) to perceive environments, while their security is doubted by DNN's vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Among them, a diversity of laser attacks emerges to be a new threat due to its minimal requirements and high attack success rate in the physical world. Nevertheless, current defense methods exhibit either a low defense success rate or a high computation cost against laser attacks. To fill this gap, we propose Laser Shield which leverages a polarizer along with a min-energy rotation mechanism to eliminate adversarial lasers from ADS scenes. We also provide a physical world dataset, LAPA, to evaluate its performance. Through exhaustive experiments with three baselines, four metrics, and three settings, Laser Shield is proved to surpass SOTA performance.