Federated Adversarial Learning for Robust Autonomous Landing Runway Detection

As the development of deep learning techniques in autonomous landing systems continues to grow, one of the major challenges is trust and security in the face of possible adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a federated adversarial learning-based framework to detect landing runways using paired data comprising of clean local data and its adversarial version. Firstly, the local model is pre-trained on a large-scale lane detection dataset. Then, instead of exploiting large instance-adaptive models, we resort to a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method known as scale and shift deep features (SSF), upon the pre-trained model. Secondly, in each SSF layer, distributions of clean local data and its adversarial version are disentangled for accurate statistics estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first instance of federated learning work that address the adversarial sample problem in landing runway detection. Our experimental evaluations over both synthesis and real images of Landing Approach Runway Detection (LARD) dataset consistently demonstrate good performance of the proposed federated adversarial learning and robust to adversarial attacks.