A Study Of Adversarial Attacks And Detection On Deep Learning-Based Plant Disease Identification

Transfer learning using pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) has been widely used for plant disease identification recently. However, pre-trained DNNs are susceptible to adversarial attacks which generate adversarial samples causing DNN models to make wrong predictions. Successful adversarial attacks on deep learning (DL)-based plant disease identification systems could result in a significant delay of treatments and huge economic losses. This paper is the first attempt to study adversarial attacks and detection on DL-based plant disease identification. Our results show that adversarial attacks with a small number of perturbations can dramatically degrade the performance of DNN models for plant disease identification. We also find that adversarial attacks can be effectively defended by using adversarial sample detection with an appropriate choice of features. Our work will serve as a basis for developing more robust DNN models for plant disease identification and guiding the defense against adversarial attacks.