Sensor Data Validation and Driving Safety in Autonomous Driving Systems

Autonomous driving technology has drawn a lot of attention due to its fast development and extremely high commercial values. The recent technological leap of autonomous driving can be primarily attributed to the progress in the environment perception. Good environment perception provides accurate high-level environment information which is essential for autonomous vehicles to make safe and precise driving decisions and strategies. Moreover, such progress in accurate environment perception would not be possible without deep learning models and advanced onboard sensors, such as optical sensors (LiDARs and cameras), radars, GPS. However, the advanced sensors and deep learning models are prone to recently invented attack methods. For example, LiDARs and cameras can be compromised by optical attacks, and deep learning models can be attacked by adversarial examples. The attacks on advanced sensors and deep learning models can largely impact the accuracy of the environment perception, posing great threats to the safety and security of autonomous vehicles. In this thesis, we study the detection methods against the attacks on onboard sensors and the linkage between attacked deep learning models and driving safety for autonomous vehicles. To detect the attacks, redundant data sources can be exploited, since information distortions caused by attacks in victim sensor data result in inconsistency with the information from other redundant sources. To study the linkage between attacked deep learning models and driving safety...