publications

2026

1. SPIE

   Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

   Nicole Villavicencio-Garduño, Maksim Ekin Eren, Milo Prisbrey, and 2 more authors

   In SPIE, 2026

   Abs arXiv Bib Code

   Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (<20 kHz), and we further expand our analysis to include how various image and object features are affected by the attacks. Specifically, we performed physical experiments to demonstrate the viability of our attacks on an off-the-shelf object detection model (YOLO11) by resonating a commercially available camera with various frequencies. Based on our results, we provide insights into several factors that make an AI CV system more vulnerable to these attacks, which could help inform the development of future mitigation strategies.

   @inproceedings{villavicencio2026headache,
     title = {Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications},
     author = {Villavicencio-Gardu{\~n}o, Nicole and Eren, Maksim Ekin and Prisbrey, Milo and Migliori, Ben and Teti, Michael},
     booktitle = {SPIE},
     year = {2026},
   }