ABBA: Saliency-Regularized Motion-Based Adversarial Blur Attack

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to noise-based adversarial examples, which can mislead the networks by adding random-like noise. However, such examples are hardly found in the real world and easily perceived when thumping noises are used to keep their high transferability across different models. In this paper, we identify a new attacking method termed motion-based adversarial blur attack (ABBA) that can generate visually natural motion-blurred adversarial examples even with relatively high perturbation, allowing much better transferability than noise-based methods. To this end, we first formulate the kernel-prediction-based attack where an input image is convolved with kernels in a pixel-wise way, and the misclassification capability is achieved by tuning the kernel weights. To generate visually more natural and plausible examples, we further propose the saliency-regularized adversarial kernel prediction where the salient region serves as a moving object, and the predicted kernel is regularized to achieve naturally visual effects. Besides, the attack can be further enhanced by adaptively tuning the translations of object and background. Extensive experimental results on the NeurIPS'17 adversarial competition dataset validate the effectiveness of ABBA by considering various kernel sizes, translations, and regions. Furthermore, we study the effects of state-of-the-art GAN-based deblurring mechanisms to our methods.