AdvIllum: defeating edge-AI person detection with eight LEDs and a math problem
Most adversarial attacks on surveillance cameras require the target to wear something. This one doesn't. An eight-channel 850 nm LED array, an ESP32, and an offline optimization loop are enough to make any person passing through the illuminated zone disappear from the camera's AI — without saturating the sensor, without triggering alarms, from 8 to 24 meters away. Here's how the physics works, what the optimizer is actually doing, and why the "confusion band" is the attack surface that nobody in the surveillance industry is talking about.