Color and Edge-Aware Adversarial Image Perturbations

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel adversarial image perturbation methods that minimize human detectability by considering human visual perception, and demonstrates their effectiveness and computational efficiency in fooling classifiers.

Contribution

It proposes Edge-Aware and Color-Aware adversarial perturbation techniques that incorporate human perceptual factors, improving stealth and efficiency over existing methods.

Findings

Effective in causing misclassification

Less perceptible to humans

Comparable computational efficiency

Abstract

Adversarial perturbation of images, in which a source image is deliberately modified with the intent of causing a classifier to misclassify the image, provides important insight into the robustness of image classifiers. In this work we develop two new methods for constructing adversarial perturbations, both of which are motivated by minimizing human ability to detect changes between the perturbed and source image. The first of these, the Edge-Aware method, reduces the magnitude of perturbations permitted in smooth regions of an image where changes are more easily detected. Our second method, the Color-Aware method, performs the perturbation in a color space which accurately captures human ability to distinguish differences in colors, thus reducing the perceived change. The Color-Aware and Edge-Aware methods can also be implemented simultaneously, resulting in image perturbations which account for both human color perception and sensitivity to changes in homogeneous regions. Because Edge-Aware and Color-Aware modifications exist for many image perturbations techniques, we also focus on computation to demonstrate their potential for use within more complex perturbation schemes. We empirically demonstrate that the Color-Aware and Edge-Aware perturbations we consider effectively cause misclassification, are less distinguishable to human perception, and are as easy to compute as the most efficient image perturbation techniques. Code and demo available at https://github.com/rbassett3/Color-and-Edge-Aware-Perturbations