Thermal Topology Collapse: Universal Physical Patch Attacks on Infrared Vision Systems

Infrared pedestrian detectors are increasingly deployed in all-weather perception systems, but their robustness against physical adversarial attacks remains insufficiently understood. Existing infrared physical attacks are mostly instance-specific, requiring perturbations to be optimized for particular samples, poses, or scenes, which limits scalability under changing deployment conditions. This paper proposes Universal Physical Patch Attack (UPPA), a universal cold-patch framework for infrared pedestrian detection. UPPA is built on the observation that infrared physical perturbations should exploit smooth, low-frequency thermal structures rather than visible-light texture patterns. It represents the attack carrier as topology-constrained B'ezier Curved-Blocks, providing a compact and manufacturable geometric parameterization, and optimizes one shared perturbation with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) under Thin Plate Spline (TPS) deformation and Expectation over Transformation (EOT) imaging transformations. The optimized pattern is then deployed as wearable cold patches without sample-specific re-optimization during deployment. Experiments on five infrared datasets and nine pedestrian detectors show consistent digital attack performance, strong cross-dataset and cross-model transferability, and a 92.59% attack success rate in real-world physical experiments. Ablation, visualization, and defense analyses show that Curved-Blocks disrupt pedestrian thermal feature aggregation and remain difficult for image-restoration-style defenses to remove. These results reveal a practical universal physical vulnerability in current infrared pedestrian detection systems and provide a benchmark for robustness evaluation.