Beyond the Glow: Understanding Luminescent Marker Behavior Against Autonomous Vehicle Perception Systems

Autonomous driving (AD) systems rely heavily on accurate lane marker detection for safe navigation, particularly during nighttime or low-light conditions. While luminescent lane markers have been introduced to improve visibility and enhance road safety in these scenarios, they also introduce potential vulnerabilities. This paper investigates these risks by introducing novel luminescent adversarial attacks that exploit the lane detection models used in autonomous vehicles (AVs). We demonstrate how these attacks, targeting deep neural network-based perception models, can manipulate the textural properties of the markers to cause misdetection of lanes, leading to safety violations. Through comprehensive experiments in both digital and physical domains, we systematically expose the vulnerabilities of state-of-the-art lane detection models to adversarial luminescent markers. In our digital experiments, we observe complete model failure in the worst cases and a failure rate of approximately 33% in the best cases. Physical experiments using a device running Openpilot further confirm these risks, underscoring a significant safety threat posed by luminescent adversarial attacks. Our findings emphasize the need for robust defenses to protect AVs from such adversarial threats.