DeepBillboard: Systematic Physical-World Testing of Autonomous Driving Systems

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in many autonomous systems such as autonomous driving. Recently, DNN testing has been intensively studied to automatically generate adversarial examples, which inject small-magnitude perturbations into inputs to test DNNs under extreme situations. While existing testing techniques prove to be effective, they mostly focus on generating digital adversarial perturbations (particularly for autonomous driving), e.g., changing image pixels, which may never happen in physical world. There is a critical missing piece in the literature on autonomous driving testing: understanding and exploiting both digital and physical adversarial perturbation generation for impacting steering decisions. In this paper, we present DeepBillboard, a systematic physical-world testing approach targeting at a common and practical driving scenario: drive-by billboards. DeepBillboard is capable of generating a robust and resilient printable adversarial billboard, which works under dynamic changing driving conditions including viewing angle, distance, and lighting. The objective is to maximize the possibility, degree, and duration of the steering-angle errors of an autonomous vehicle driving by the generated adversarial billboard. We have extensively evaluated the efficacy and robustness of DeepBillboard through conducting both digital and physical-world experiments. Results show that DeepBillboard is effective for various steering models and scenes. Furthermore, DeepBillboard is sufficiently robust and resilient for generating physical-world adversarial billboard tests for real-world driving under various weather conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating the possibility of generating realistic and continuous physical-world tests for practical autonomous driving systems.