Adversarial Robustness of Camera-Radar Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving

Ce Zhou, Yubo Wu, Khang Nguyen, Liyang Xiao, Thomas Hou +1

Autonomous driving (AD) relies on multi-sensor perception to interpret the surrounding environment. However, the robustness of camera--radar fusion under adversarial conditions remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic measurement study of the robustness of camera--radar sensor fusion in AD. We construct a unified evaluation pipeline on the nuScenes dataset that simulates attacks on both sensing modalities, including eight camera-image perturbations and three radar point-cloud perturbations. We evaluate five camera--radar fusion algorithms across two perception tasks, 3D object detection and depth estimation, and quantify their performance under clean and attacked inputs using standard metrics. Our evaluation reveals a clear asymmetry in the robustness of fusion systems. Camera perturbations substantially degrade both object detection and depth estimation, and moderate attack strengths are already sufficient to cause severe performance degradation. In contrast, the evaluated radar perturbations produce smaller and task-dependent effects, with object-detection models showing particularly limited degradation. Our analysis attributes this difference to the strong…