Stealthy in Semantics, Antagonistic in Space: Attacking Visible-Infrared Object Detectors via Object-Level Misalignment

2026-09-16

AI Summary

本文提出CamoShift框架，通过视觉伪装和红外偏移破坏可见光-红外对象检测器的跨模态空间对齐，使用Semantic Camouflage Module和Object-level Spatial Decoupling Module实现攻击的同时保持视觉隐蔽性。

Abstract

Visible-infrared object detectors are used for robust perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. Current physical attacks apply conspicuous patches to spatially aligned target regions, which are noticeable to human observers. Meanwhile, most of these methods only perturb the appearance within the aligned region, without explicitly targeting the correspondence between modalities or the fusion process. In this paper, we propose CamoShift, an adversarial framework for visible-infrared object detection. By combining visual camouflage with object-level infrared shifting, CamoShift breaks cross-modal spatial alignment and disrupts fusion. Specifically, the Semantic Camouflage Module (SCM) generates a stealthy camouflaged patch that can be attached to the host object and maintains its effectiveness in the infrared branch through an RGB-IR adapter. The Object-level Spatial Decoupling Module (OSDM) shifts the infrared target evidence in a scale-aware manner, so as to break object-level correspondence and disrupt cross-modal fusion. Then, the Harmonic Adversarial loss (HarAdv loss) further balances attack strength and visual stealth during optimization. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to target both visual stealthiness and attack success in visible-infrared object detection. Extensive experimental results show that CamoShift achieves a superior balance between attack effectiveness and visual stealth. Code and models will be available on GitHub.

Problem

• visible-infrared object detection
• physical attacks
• spatial alignment
• cross-modal fusion

Innovation

• CamoShift
• Semantic Camouflage Module (SCM)
• Object-level Spatial Decoupling Module (OSDM)
• Harmonic Adversarial loss (HarAdv loss)