Adversarial Robustness of Camera-Radar Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

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 dependence of existing fusion architectures on dense camera features, together with the filtering, association, and confidence-weighting mechanisms commonly applied to sparse radar measurements. These results demonstrate that sensor fusion does not inherently guarantee robustness and that the contribution and reliability of each sensing modality must be explicitly considered under adversarial conditions. Based on four empirical findings, we derive measurement-guided design implications for future robust camera--radar fusion, including modality-specific reliability estimation, cross-modal consistency checking, adaptive fusion, and graceful failover under severe sensor degradation.