What if Adversarial Samples were Digital Images?

Abstract

Although adversarial sampling is a trendy topic in computer vision, very few works consider the integral constraint: The result of the attack is a digital image whose pixel values are integers. This is not an issue at first sight since applying a rounding after forging an adversarial sample trivially does the job. Yet, this paper shows theoretically and experimentally that this operation has a big impact. The adversarial perturbations are fragile signals whose quantization destroys its ability to delude an image classifier. This paper presents a new quantization mechanism which preserves the adversariality of the perturbation. Its application outcomes to a new look at the lessons learnt in adversarial sampling.