X-Adv: Physical Adversarial Object Attacks against X-ray Prohibited Item Detection

Adversarial attacks are valuable for evaluating the robustness of deep learning models. Existing attacks are primarily conducted on the visible light spectrum (e.g., pixel-wise texture perturbation). However, attacks targeting texture-free X-ray images remain underexplored, despite the widespread application of X-ray imaging in safety-critical scenarios such as the X-ray detection of prohibited items. In this paper, we take the first step toward the study of adversarial attacks targeted at X-ray prohibited item detection, and reveal the serious threats posed by such attacks in this safety-critical scenario. Specifically, we posit that successful physical adversarial attacks in this scenario should be specially designed to circumvent the challenges posed by color/texture fading and complex overlapping. To this end, we propose X-Adv to generate physically printable metals that act as an adversarial agent capable of deceiving X-ray detectors when placed in luggage. To resolve the issues associated with color/texture fading, we develop a differentiable converter that facilitates the generation of 3D-printable objects with adversarial shapes, using the gradients of a surrogate model rather than directly generating adversarial textures. To place the printed 3D adversarial objects in luggage with complex overlapped instances, we design a policy-based reinforcement learning strategy to find locations eliciting strong attack performance in worst-case scenarios whereby the prohibited items are heavily occluded by other items. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed X-Adv, we conduct extensive experiments in both the digital and the physical world (employing a commercial X-ray security inspection system for the latter case). Furthermore, we present the physical-world X-ray adversarial attack dataset XAD. We hope this paper will draw more attention to the potential threats targeting safety-critical scenarios. Our codes and XAD dataset are available at https://github.com/DIG-Beihang/X-adv.